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!
Continue reading: Biotechnology for fuels and chemicals

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.
Continue reading: Oxford Nanopore Technology and IBERS

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.
Continue reading: G8HORCs, process technology and synthetic biology

A felicitous engagement with any number of media outlets (e.g. print, radio, TV) is an important skill to have (for scientists as well as CEOs), and – like any others – can be improved with practice. BBSRC has long run a very successful series for our funded scientists. To this end, I attended a very useful training course designed to refresh my own skills in these areas. Marshalling one’s thoughts for a lay audience, and understanding their intellectual background, is a particular driver of clarity (as I was reminded when being asked to explain the meaning of a Petabyte…).

Readers will know that I have a considerable interest in carbon sequestration (a review will shortly appear), but this has largely been confined to land-based solutions. The ocean holds some 50 times more C than does the atmosphere (see e.g. David MacKay’s book), and can of course exchange CO₂ with it. To this end, I enjoyed a very useful discussion in Oxford, that drew my attention to some proposals for liming the oceans, first apparently suggested by Kheshgi and being developed elsewhere.
Continue reading: Media training, Cquestration, JISC and biotechnologies

As well as a further set of PPDRs and many internal meetings, a number of last week’s engagements seemed to be around the animal health area, including a meeting with Chris Whitty, Chief Scientific Adviser at the Department for International Development, and the launch of the Global Strategic Alliance for the Coordination of Research on the Major Infectious Diseases of Animals and Zoonoses (STAR-IDAZ) network. The latter is an EC-funded project, led by Alex Morrow of Defra, designed to bring together relevant experts from a very large number of countries worldwide to help coordinate of national research programmes on animal health (including livestock, aquatic animals and bees) and zoonoses world-wide.

Sharing information and discussing it widely is an important part of our work, and the Research Councils hosted a series of meetings with Professor Kathy Sykes from the University of Bristol who chairs the relevant Advisory Group for RCUK. In terms of dissemination, I was pleased to note that this blog itself is referred to as a ‘top tweet’ in the Biofuels Digest!
Continue reading: Animals, development, networks and public engagement