In Texas, Wayne Versaw, Associate Professor at Texas A&M University in College Station is the lead researcher in a $1.2 million grant from the Department of Energy to support the development of biosensors to track and measure the movement of phosphate from soil fungi into plant cells in real time. The biosensor system will provide […]
In Massachusetts, University of Massachusetts Amherst computational chemist Scott Auerbach has been awarded a three-year, $330,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to improve basic understanding and optimize the process of producing fuels such as gasoline from plant biomass instead of from petroleum. For more than 50 years, Auerbach explains, chemists and chemical engineers have […]
In Illinois, the University of Illinois has estimates from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), indicate that U.S. production of fuel ethanol totaled 14.313 billion gallons during the 2014 calendar year. That is 1.02 billion gallons more than produced in 2013 and about 384 million gallons more than the previous record production in 2011. For […]
In California, the state has not taken full advantage of opportunities to increase its in-state production of biofuel, despite state policies that encourage biofuel consumption, according to a report by the Climate Change and Business Research Initiative at the UCLA and UC Berkeley law schools. Coming on the heels of new Environmental Protection Agency rules […]
In Wisconsin, researchers have developed a new method for making interspecies yeast hybrids in the lab, making hybrids at rates of one in a thousand cells. The research team related its results in a special synthetic biology issue of the journal Fungal Genetics and Biology. It is much more efficient than nature. The new yeast […]
In New York state, a research team led by William Jones at the University of Rochester has developed a series of reactions that results in the selective conversion of ethanol to butanol, without producing unwanted byproducts. Jones was able to increase the amount of ethanol converted to butanol by almost 25 percent over currently used […]
In New Jersey, Picatinny engineers have partnered with private industry to harness its photosynthesis ability to develop a safe, cheap, fast and environmentally-friendly way to recycle aging M6 artillery round propellant and create biofuel. Propellant is the chemical substance in the artillery round that ignites and propels the round out of the howitzer tube. Currently, […]
In California, biofuel to run cars and generators could come from large swaths of seaweed grown in the open ocean. That’s the vision of a new project being led by Marine BioEnergy, Inc., in collaboration with PNNL and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California, San Diego. Marine BioEnergy has proposed a patented […]
In Washington state, University of Washington scientists have sequenced the complete genetic makeup of a haptophyte, an ancient group of algae that evolved in the world’s oceans before our backboned ancestors crawled onto land. They are so numerous that their gigantic blooms can affect the weather, and they account for 30 to 40 percent of […]
In Maryland, The US Patent and Trademark Office issued patent number 9,193,979 for ethanol-tolerant microorganisms that convert cellulosic biomass to ethanol. The patent describes using the microorganisms to produce ethanol from crop or waste biomass like food waste, crop residues (e.g. corn stalks), algae, or leaves. In contrast to most current biochemical methods to produce […]
