Newly developed technologies use biological processes instead

Feb 29, 2012 10:44 GMT  ·  By
Lygos co-founders Jay Keasling, Clem Fortman, Jeffrey Dietrich, Eric Steen and Leonard Katz
   Lygos co-founders Jay Keasling, Clem Fortman, Jeffrey Dietrich, Eric Steen and Leonard Katz

Investigators at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) announce the development of technologies able to produce petrochemicals without using actual petroleum. They have already started a company to commercialize the process.

This particular class of chemicals is extremely important, since it goes into literally thousands of different types of products. They can be found in food preservatives, plastic compounds, clothes and nearly everything in between.

The downside is that they are made using petroleum. Vast amounts of petroleum, in fact, experts say. What the JBEI team tried to do was find a way of using biological processes to obtain these chemicals, without using oil at all.

Synthetic biologists at the Institute say that they managed to do that in a recent study. Their new startup, called Lygos, will attempt to develop this approach further, potentially making it suitable for practical applications at a wide scale.

JBEI was set up with the primary goal of researching methods of producing cellulosic biofuels, back in 2007. It mostly comprises experts from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Sandia National Laboratory, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and several universities.

The latter include the Universities of California in Berkeley (UCB) and Davis (UCD), as well as the Carnegie Institution for Science (CIW). JBEI director Jay Keasling is one of the five co-founders of Lygos.

“This is the future of chemical manufacturing. Oil is becoming expensive, and at some point it will be depleted. Sugar is getting more expensive, but it’s still lagging way behind oil,” JBEI researcher and Lygos CEO and co-founder, Jeffrey Fortman, explains.

The group developed special, designer microorganisms, which can metabolize sugar into a wide array of molecules. The latter can then be used for a number of practical applications in various fields.

“It’s a broad array of things we can make; estimates are in the tens of thousands, or even higher, of different molecules we could potentially make. However the mass market compounds are far fewer than that,” Fortman concludes.