BSE News

Scientists at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) are collaborating with X – the moonshot incubator led by Google parent company Alphabet – to not only skip the problematic plastic separation step, but also make the final product better for the planet. 

Gas fermentation, a process in which microorganisms convert waste gases into commodity chemicals, has the potential to inexpensively manufacture sustainable bio-based materials and fuels to help create a circular bioeconomy. In response to industry requests, ABPDU has purchased, installed, and commissioned gas fermentation equipment with internal Berkeley Lab funding. This capability now enables ABPDU’s industrial collaborators to pursue process development and scale-up projects involving the bioconversion of gaseous feedstocks.

Anne Villacastin placed first and was also selected as People’s Choice in the Berkeley Lab Research SLAM competition on September 21, 2023. Villacastin, a postdoctoral researcher at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) and in the Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology (EGSB) Division, detailed her research on sorghum’s potential as a biomanufacturing feedstock. In its sixth … Read more »

Researchers from the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) developed a new framework that reduces the time of developing novel bioproducts. This new workflow, called Product Substrate Pairing (PSP), has already shown great promise for engineering strains that can convert common bacterial food sources into target molecules.

The ABPDU’s Scale-Up Facilities Expo took place on Aug. 7, 2023, bringing together scale-up facilities and startup researchers. The all-day event saw 249 attendees from 29 countries attend 32 facility presentations, giving them the opportunity to learn about a variety of scale-up capabilities beyond those available at the ABPDU.