Wednesday, August 24, 2005
GMO takes over oil's most critical use....
From a Press release:
Finding "green" methods to make key chemical intermediates like succinate is a high priority for the chemical industry. Green technologies use renewable resources like agricultural crops rather than non-renewable fossil fuels, and they produce less waste.
"Succinate is a high-priority chemical that the U.S. Department of Energy has targeted for biosynthesis," said process co-developer George Bennett, professor and chair of the department of biochemistry and cell biology at Rice. "One reason for this is succinate's broad utility -- it can be used to make everything from non-corrosive airport deicers and non-toxic solvents to plastics, drugs and food additives. Succinate's also a priority because some bacteria make it naturally, so we have a metabolic starting place for large-scale fermentation."
The centerpiece of Rice's succinate technology is a mutant form of E. coli that makes succinate as it's only metabolic byproduct. The bug contains more than a half-dozen genetic modifications. It was created over the past four years by the research groups of Bennett and collaborator Ka-Yiu San.
The technology is taking its first step from the lab to the marketplace this month with the start of industrial scale-up efforts in Kansas. These efforts resulted from an $80,000 award from the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Bennett and San are working with Manhattan-based AgRenew Inc., which just began testing how to use farm-grown products like grain sorghum as feedstocks for the succinate-producing bacteria.
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GMO science is the most under-reported story of this decade. Partly because of the old country mouse / city mouse thing: elites, conservative or liberal, look down on anything that sounds rural. Conservatives trash ag research as silly waste and abuse (cow farts and all that), and libs just hate science. More to the point, libs hate GMO's ability to break the mainsprings of their power. They have already inoculated their pet African leaders against using GMO to relieve famine, because self-sufficient farmers break the welfare cycle. It will be interesting to see how the Left plays this development. You might call it a battle between Mutant Organisms and Mutant Thinking.
Meanwhile, good things are developing rapidly and quietly -- yes, even in the Flyover Manhattan. ¶ 7:09 AM
Finding "green" methods to make key chemical intermediates like succinate is a high priority for the chemical industry. Green technologies use renewable resources like agricultural crops rather than non-renewable fossil fuels, and they produce less waste.
"Succinate is a high-priority chemical that the U.S. Department of Energy has targeted for biosynthesis," said process co-developer George Bennett, professor and chair of the department of biochemistry and cell biology at Rice. "One reason for this is succinate's broad utility -- it can be used to make everything from non-corrosive airport deicers and non-toxic solvents to plastics, drugs and food additives. Succinate's also a priority because some bacteria make it naturally, so we have a metabolic starting place for large-scale fermentation."
The centerpiece of Rice's succinate technology is a mutant form of E. coli that makes succinate as it's only metabolic byproduct. The bug contains more than a half-dozen genetic modifications. It was created over the past four years by the research groups of Bennett and collaborator Ka-Yiu San.
The technology is taking its first step from the lab to the marketplace this month with the start of industrial scale-up efforts in Kansas. These efforts resulted from an $80,000 award from the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Bennett and San are working with Manhattan-based AgRenew Inc., which just began testing how to use farm-grown products like grain sorghum as feedstocks for the succinate-producing bacteria.
-----
GMO science is the most under-reported story of this decade. Partly because of the old country mouse / city mouse thing: elites, conservative or liberal, look down on anything that sounds rural. Conservatives trash ag research as silly waste and abuse (cow farts and all that), and libs just hate science. More to the point, libs hate GMO's ability to break the mainsprings of their power. They have already inoculated their pet African leaders against using GMO to relieve famine, because self-sufficient farmers break the welfare cycle. It will be interesting to see how the Left plays this development. You might call it a battle between Mutant Organisms and Mutant Thinking.
Meanwhile, good things are developing rapidly and quietly -- yes, even in the Flyover Manhattan. ¶ 7:09 AM
