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I blog fairly regularly about the scientific opportunities opened up by the online digital availability of huge amounts of interesting stuff. One very useful set of stuff concerns the properties of small molecules, that may be of interest in general or, more particularly, because of their possible use in chemical biology/genetics (also known as chemical genomics), especially using fragment-based methods, and the possibility of mining such data using the powerful methods of chemometrics and cheminformatics. This week I learnt about the progress being made by the Chemspider operation that is a fully open access portal for small molecules and their properties, recently acquired by the Royal Society of Chemistry. The utility and number of users are growing apace, and the increasing availability of its features via Web Services will enable software programs to interrogate it when they need to explore chemical space automatically. The academic cheminformatics community in the UK is currently rather small, and there are consequently considerable opportunities for those who would invest in expanding it.
Continue reading: Chemical spiders, agriculture and the next generation of bioscientists
As I start to write this, I am just returning on the Shinkansen to Tokyo airport from the 2009 Science and Technology in Society Forum held in Kyoto. Styled as ‘the Davos of Japan’, this meeting brought together some 600 CEOs and research leaders, including many Nobelists, to discuss the important role that Science has to play in solving the world’s problems, with global health and sustainable energy (including bioenergy) production very much to the fore. The breadth and depth of the discussions were profound.
Continue reading: Science and Technology in Society Forum 2009
Industrial or white biotechnology refers to the harnessing of cells and enzymes to make products of interest (that may be the enzymes themselves), usually using microorganisms as the hosts. It is an important and growing sector for BBSRC, both in terms of basic biology and in ‘green’ application areas such as biofuels and biochemicals, since one may anticipate an increasing contribution of biotechnology to the industrial production of chemicals as we move away from petrochemical feedstocks. Creating an improving a bioprocess is a combinatorial optimisation problem at every step of the way, since even from a genomic point of view the number of possible sequences is enormous. I blogged before about this from the points of view of aptamer optimisation and of increasing expression levels of proteins in E. coli.
Continue reading: Whither industrial biotechnology?
As announced on our website, I was pleased to participate last Tuesday (Jan 27) in the press briefing and formal launch of BSBEC, a nested acronym that stands for the BBSRC Sustainable Bioenergy Centre. This is a virtual centre that represents a collaboration between a large number of research institutions and is part of the Research Councils’ Energy Programme. It involves a BBSRC investment of £20M with additional investments of £7M from industry, plus further contributions from the consortium partners.
The focus of a very exciting scientific programme is on the generation of bioenergy and transport biofuels from woody biomass and from waste materials that do not compete with food production for land (as do many so-called first-generation biofuels). The origins of this programme lay in a report from a Panel that I chaired for BBSRC, and in some of the analyses from the subsequent Gallagher report.
Continue reading: A virtual centre for second-generation bioenergy research
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