UC Davis, U of Tokyo land $12M algae R&D project

January 18, 2012 |

In California, UC Davis has teamed with the University of Tokyo in Japan in a project jointly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Japan Science and Technology Agency to develop bioenergy. All four projects, with a total of $12 million in grants, are based on metabolomics, an approach that uses high-tech analysis to understand all the chemicals involved in a living cell’s metabolism.

The ability to identify and characterize these compounds could lead to entirely new and potentially breakthrough approaches for increasing biofuel production and reducing pesticide use. The team will separate the complex mixtures of sugars, other carbohydrates, fats and oils made by algae. Then they will develop software to identify the thousands of compounds and put them into a database run by the research group in Japan.

Category: Research

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