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! [...]

The understanding of biochemical and other networks is an important part of systems biology, and I enjoyed attending an interesting seminar on “network-based drug design” by Péter Csermely of Semmelweiss University, where I was alerted to a number of his papers such as this one, and even a book, that had passed me by. Not for the first time, one is led to lament the difficulty of keeping up with the voluminous literature.

We had a meeting of the Chairs of the Institute Assessment Panels. Council also met.

I attended the launch by Minister of Universities and Science David Willetts of the Innovation and Research Strategy for Growth paper (pdf), which set down a number of important initiatives for the research base. [...]

The first engagement of last week involved chairing a session involving introducing the ELIXIR project and overseeing the election of a Chair (Søren Bruak) and vice-Chair (BBSRC’s Alf Game) for the ELIXIR Interim Board, with the voting participants involving the nine countries that have thus far signed up formally. Scientific and funding representatives of a good many other countries also attended both the election and the meeting following, and it was gratifying to note the consonance of purpose (‘a collaboration of the willing’) in the governance and rollout of everyone involved in this major piece of e-infrastructure development.

I then attended our next Institute Assessment Panel, this time at The Roslin Institute. As with the other Panels, whose form it followed, it was a very packed but worthwhile agenda, and a useful opportunity to discuss all of the projects and activities en masse. Again, with another three visits before Christmas, it will not be until the New Year that BBSRC Council determines the final founding outcomes. [...]

The blog and I were still on holiday last week, though I managed to catch up on some writing and reading. I especially enjoyed reading an interesting book charting the rise of Google, written by an employee who managed the branding in the early days. As well as that organisation’s well-known strategy of hiring extremely bright engineers, one facet that came over very strongly was the exceptionally hard work that was involved (this too a theme of Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers and of Matthew Syed’s Bounce). I am also enjoying dipping into the book by Nathan Yau – founder of FlowingData – on Information Visualisation.

Following the appearance of my ‘deep roots’ paper, that even got a namecheck at the Financial Times online, my attention was drawn to a recent review of the considerable role of agronomic practice in improving root architecture, drought tolerance and the like, as encapsulated in the System of Rice Intensification. Such approaches bear wider dissemination. [...]

Last week I managed to attend a scientific conference on the topic of how cells are organised, mainly from a systems biology point of view. There is an emerging trend that recognises that cellular proteins are organised in a much more coherent manner than the ‘bag of enzymes’ view of (e.g.) the cytoplasm might suggest. As there is not space to mention everything, and conference rules disallow communicating unpublished data presented, I shall comment on just a few areas. One was a reminder of the fascinating work on cell stratification (recently reprised) showing the essential absence of ‘soluble’ proteins in living cytoplasm (and see also a classic review), while another gave an update on the role of supercomplexes in oxidative phosphorylation. A third focussed on protein unfolding in vivo (quite different from in vitro…), and another on the increasingly widely recognised role of intrinsically disordered proteins. [...]