BSE News

Earlier this month the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced the selection of 36 projects totaling $80 million to support early-stage bioenergy research and development (R&D), including three that will make use of DOE’s Agile BioFoundry expertise in the areas of advanced biomanufacturing and bioproducts.

This R&D will enable cost-competitive, drop-in renewable hydrocarbon fuels, bio-based products, and power from non-food biomass and waste feedstocks. The work supports the DOE’s goal of reducing the cost of bio-based drop-in fuels to $3/gallon by 2022 to continue to provide consumers with affordable, reliable transportation energy choices.

Biosciences scientists Héctor García Martín, Jay Keasling, and Jill Banfield (whose primary affiliation is with the Earth & Environmental Sciences Area) were mentioned an article by Amia Srinivasan entitled “What Termites Can Teach Us” published in The New Yorker. Read the article.

This past Saturday, August 11, seven Biotech Partners high school students who interned at the Biosciences Area participated at the Biotech Partners end of summer celebration and poster competition. Four of the seven Biosciences interns made it to the finalists round of the poster competition. Mitzy Rubio from the Biological Systems and Engineering (BSE) Division received an honorable mention for “Most Creative Poster” and Raven Young from the Joint Genome Institute (JGI) received an honorable mention for “Best Oral Presentation”.

The Introductory College Level Experience in Microbiology (iCLEM), the Joint BioEnergy Institute’s flagship outreach program, concluded last week with a celebration which included a students’ presentation and a poster presentation by the teachers who assisted the program. Photos of the celebration are available online. Check out also the Twitter campaign in which the students shared highlights of their summer experience at JBEI.

Some chemicals used to speed up the breakdown of plants for production of biofuels like ethanol are poison to the yeasts that turn the plant sugars into fuel. Researchers from the UW-Madison-based Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, Joint BioEnergy Institute, and several Department of Energy National Laboratories have identified two changes to a single gene that can make yeast tolerate the pretreatment chemicals. They published their findings recently in the journal Genetics. To learn more read the University of  Wisconsin-Madison news release.