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Showing posts from February, 2012

Journal Club:”An Engineered Microbial Platform for Direct Biofuel Production from Brown Macroalgae”

Cover of Science Issue 335. It has been a while since we have done a journal club , and so today I thought I would write about an article I recently read. Adam J. Wargacki, who works in Yasuo Yoshikuni's group, recently published the above titled paper. In light of problems associated with the use of fossil energy sources (cost, scarcity, environmental impact, and geopolitical considerations), the search for new energy sources is starting to become more important. The paper in discussion today proposes that a coupled system consisting of brown macroalgae and engineered bacteria could be used. Of course there are more traditional biofuel feedstock sources such as corn and sugarcane. There a couple of hurdles such as the debate about “food versus fuel” and technical hurdles such as the degradation of lignocellulosic matter that need to be solved. We have previously discussed how microalgaecould get around the difficulties of corn and sugarcane in the production of bioefu

In Other Words : Bilal Bomani: Plant fuels could power a jet

Another interesting and inspiring talk from TED related to bio-based ideas was posted not too long ago.