Using the tools of synthetic biology, JBEI researchers are engineering healthy plants whose lignocellulosic biomass can more easily be broken down into simple sugars for the production of clean, green and renewable advanced biofuels.

DNA sequences and statistical models have been unveiled that greatly increase the reliability and precision by which microbes can be engineered.

Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Biofuels Process Demonstration Unit (ABPDU) is the West Coast’s only state-of-the-art facility providing industry-scale test beds for laboratory discoveries in advanced biofuels research. ABPDU’s facilities are designed to speed the commercialization of advanced biofuels by hitting the scalability “sweet spot” between bench science and commercial technology.

PR-PR, a simple high-level, biology-friendly robot-programming language developed by researchers at JBEI and Berkeley Lab, uses an object-oriented approach to make it easier to integrate robotic equipment into biological laboratories. Effective robots can increase research productivity, lower costs and provide more reliable and reproducible experimental data.

Berkeley Lab researchers have developed an “adaptor” that makes the genetic engineering of microbial components substantially easier and more predictable.

TeselaGen Biotechnology, founded by JBEI’s Nathan Hillson and two partners, says it will significantly reduce the time and cost involved with DNA synthesis and cloning, a multibillion-dollar market. It is based on the j5 software package, which has attracted users from more than 250 institutions worldwide since JBEI made it available last year.

An international team of researchers has discovered a programmable RNA complex in the bacterial immune system that guides the cleaving of DNA at targeted sites. This discovery opens a new door to genome editing with implications for the green chemistry microbial-based production of advanced biofuels, therapeutic drugs and other valuable chemical products.

Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) researchers have developed a
“dynamic sensor-regulator system” that can detect metabolic changes in microbes during the production of fatty acid-based fuels or chemicals and control the expression of genes affecting that production. The result in one demonstration was a threefold increase in the microbial production of biodiesel from glucose.

Petrochemicals are found in thousands of everyday products, from clothing to food preservatives to plastics. Imagine if many of those chemicals could be made without petroleum and instead with biological processes. Using the tools of synthetic biology scientists at the Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have done just that, and now a startup company has been formed to commercialize the technology.

Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) researchers have determined the three-dimensional crystal structure of a protein that is key to boosting the microbial-based production of bisabolane as a clean, green and renewable biosynthetic alternative to D2 diesel fuel.