Following our latest Audit Board meeting, I made an appearance (available for a while to be viewed on Parliament TV) before the very distinguished House of Lords Science and Technology Committee to discuss the RCUK implementation of the Open Access (OA) agenda.  The draft transcript of that will be forthcoming before too long, and will soon enough be published. Minister for Universities and Science David Willetts also gave evidence, just after us.

This year, BBSRC sponsored a Table at the annual dinner of the BioIndustry Association, where we were delighted to host the Minister – who gave a short and very upbeat speech about the prospects for Biotechnology – and other guests. We were also very pleased that Council member Andy Richards received a Lifetime Achievement Award, and that the winners of this year’s Biotechnology YES competition were in attendance. The BIA also published a second report (PDF) on Citizens’ Innovation funds, as one way to help fund biotechs, while the Government Office for Science published an interesting report (PDF) on assisting engagement between academia and policymakers. [...]

I began the week, as part of our activities on the Sustainable Bioeconomy in Europe, by attending part of the 15th meeting of the European Federation of Biotechnology. I used to attend more regularly as an academic, but had not been for a while. Much of the focus is still on what is called ‘white’ (i.e. microbial) biotechnology for the production of enzymes, fuels and chemicals, and some substantial progress had been made. Systems biology now also had its own strand, referred to (I do not know why) as ‘purple’ biotechnology. Presumably when applied to microbes it becomes lilac. [...]

For much of last week I – along with more than 700 other delegates – attended the 34th eponymous Symposium on Biotechnology for fuels and chemicals in the USA. The attendees were fairly evenly split between academia, industry, students and ‘Government’, while the country mix was interesting, with non-US representation mainly (in order) from Brazil, Korea, Canada, Denmark and Sweden, and with just 7 UK representatives.

In a very interesting plenary, David Glassner from Gevo described some large-scale processes for producing lactate (hence polylactate) and isobutanol in yeast. A 22 million gallon per year facility is being constructed! Many other talks followed a similar pattern, as microbial strain engineering based on systems biology modelling, pathway and enzyme engineering and ’omics were used to create strains with excellent potential and prowess, many of which were progressing to large-scale trials. Examples included 1,4-butanediol from Genomatica (and see the paper), 2,5-furan dicarboxylic acid at Bird Engineering (and paper) and a variety of long-chain alkanes, esters and fatty alcohols from LS9 (and representative paper). What is clear is that substantial progress is being made in developing processes for industrial biotechnology, and that they can only become more economic as the feedstocks for the petrochemical processes that might otherwise be used to make them increase in cost. One speaker pointed out that during one single 3h symposium session the world would use 12 million barrels of oil, or 4 supertankers’ worth! [...]

Last week involved two external visits. The first and short one was to Oxford Nanopore Technology (ONT) on the Oxford Science Park. ONT has a very exciting core technology, based on the work of Hagan Bayley at Oxford University, for sequencing DNA by studying the electrical changes accompanying the passage of DNA bases through a nm-sized (mainly, but not exclusively, biologically based) hole (a nanopore). DNA Sequencing is a highly competitive area, but one advantage of this particularly technology is that it can be (and has been) applied to a variety of other assays. [...]

Last week began with a meeting of the Heads of Research Council of the G8 nations, the G8HORCs of the title. This is an annual meeting that moves between member nations, and this time was held in the UK at and near the University of Warwick. This was a very useful opportunity to hear, in a closed setting that allowed a degree of frankness, the thoughts of equivalent leaders of research funding agencies around the world. Many of the issues are common to us all, of course (the increasing costs of doing science, open access, data floods, upskilling our communities, etc.), but the opportunity to share solutions that work was both welcome and taken. Subra Suresh, the relatively new Head of the US National Science Foundation, stayed on for further meetings with the RCUK Chief Executives both as a group and individually, and this allowed a longer and deeper discussion. [...]