In California, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have discovered a new enzyme that will enable microbial production of a renewable alternative to petroleum-based toluene, a widely used octane booster in gasoline that has a global market of twenty nine million tons per year. […]
In Colorado, it was more than 10 years in the making, but when it came to uncovering the secrets of the molecular structure of enzymes, perseverance paid off. By studying and comparing the workhorse cellulose-degrading enzymes of two fungi, researchers from the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have pinpointed regions on these enzymes […]
In Illinois, researchers at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign are using adding calcium to different corn byproducts and tweaking the solution’s pH in an effort to precipitate organic and inorganic phosphorus compounds in minutes. Doing so would not only create potential additional value using the phosphorus as fertilizer or as supplements for animal feed but […]
In New Jersey, Princeton University researchers used light to control genetically modified yeast and increase its output of commercially valuable chemicals. The team used light to enhance the production of biofuels, drugs and commercial chemicals in bioreactors, which contain microorganisms such as yeast that have been metabolically engineered to make biological products. The team uses […]
In Italy, the European Commission’s Joint Research Center released two new Certified Reference Materials (CRMs) for automotive diesel fuel containing 7 % biodiesel, so-called ‘diesel (B7)’. These CRMs will support fuel producers and fuel testing laboratories in assuring the quality of their measurements, thus improving trust in the regulatory compliance of this product on the market. […]
In Canada, Enerkem Inc. announced it had succeeded in producing a new high-performance biofuel that could improve the octane rating of fuels sold on the market and reduce their carbon footprint. The chemical engineering expertise at Enerkem’s Innovation Centre in Westbury, Quebec, allowed the company to successfully develop a process that uses its proprietary waste-to-biofuel technology […]
In New Zealand, a global scientific project led by New Zealand researchers, which has generated a reference set of genome sequences of microbes found in the stomachs of sheep and cattle, has been published in the respected international scientific journal Nature Biotechnology. The project, called the Hungate1000, was led by former AgResearch scientist Dr Bill […]
In Texas, Texas A&M researchers are looking to scale up the process that occurs in the stomach of a cow, turning organic waste into vinegar—or in this case, organic acids from two to six carbons such as alcohols, esters, and others. Producing these bio-based chemical intermediates is intended to displace those currently supplied by fossil […]
In Wisconsin, researchers at the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) discovered a method to break down solvent effects, finding a new way to measure and analyze how a solvent alters the stability of two different points of a chemical reaction, the initial state and the transition state. The method, which relies on experimentation and […]
In Wisconsin, for researchers at the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC), the central role of solvents in converting non-food biomass to biofuels and bioproducts means they’re ripe for optimization. Better use of solvents could improve the economics of biorefineries, push a range of new and more sustainable biofuels and bioproducts to market, and provide […]
