Bioengineering cells for more efficient biofuel production | KurzweilAI

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In the search for renewable alternatives to gasoline, heavy alcohols such as isobutanol are promising candidates.

They contain more energy than ethanol and are also more compatible with existing gasoline-based infrastructure.

For isobutanol to become practical, however, scientists need a way to reliably produce huge quantities of it from renewable sources.

MIT chemical engineers and biologists have now devised a way to dramatically boost isobutanol production in yeast, which naturally make it in small amounts. They engineered yeast so that isobutanol synthesis takes place entirely within mitochondria, cell structures that generate energy and also host many biosynthetic pathways. Using this approach, they were able to boost isobutanol production by about 260 percent.

Though still short of the scale needed for industrial production, the advance suggests that this is a promising approach to engineering not only isobutanol but other useful chemicals as well, says Gregory Stephanopoulos, an MIT professor of chemical engineering and one of the senior authors of a paper describing the work in the Feb. 17 online edition of Nature Biotechnology

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Stanford Researchers Produce First Computer Model of Living Organism

Stanford University scientists reported on Thursday they had made the first full computer model of an organism, another breakthrough in a field that’s both raising hopes of fighting disease and stoking fears of biological engineering.

The team, led by Markus W. Covert, a professor of bioengineering at Stanford, made the model using Mycoplasma genitalium, a standard target for such work because of its status as the world’s smallest free-living bacterium.

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education(Subscription may be required for some content)

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Scientists Grow Cheap Biodegradable Solar Using Tobacco : TreeHugger Researchers at UC Berkeley have hacked tobacco plants to grow synthetic photovoltaic cells which can then be extracted and sprayed onto any substrate to create solar cells. How? The scientists tweaked a few genes within the tobacco mosaic virus to build tiny structures called chromophores. Once the plant is sprayed with the virus, the new chromophores will group into tightly coiled formations. Chromophores are structures that turn light into high powered electrons.

Scientists Grow Cheap Biodegradable Solar Using Tobacco : TreeHugger

Researchers at UC Berkeley have hacked tobacco plants to grow synthetic photovoltaic cells which can then be extracted and sprayed onto any substrate to create solar cells. How? The scientists tweaked a few genes within the tobacco mosaic virus to build tiny structures called chromophores. Once the plant is sprayed with the virus, the new chromophores will group into tightly coiled formations. Chromophores are structures that turn light into high powered electrons.

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