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Bio572: Plant and Microbial Biology Journal Club April 26 2013 Oliver Yu: Biofuels

Today’s topic is microbiology. We will be focusing on biofuel and biomaterial. More specifically, we will be discussing how synthetic biology can be used to engineer microbes as a production platform to produce sustainable fuel and materials for human consumption.

The first set of questions is more generic. You are encouraged to find the answers on the internet. Some of these answers can be found in the accompanying review article (but not all of the answers). 1. There are a lot of excitements about the shale gas in America. Based on latest estimates, approximately how much shale gas is there in America? What are the advantages and disadvantages about this ‘new’ source of energy? 2. Do you think biofuels and bio-chemicals can be used to replace petro-products on a large scale? Why or why not? 3. What problems and challenges does the lignocellulose ethanol technology have? 4. Which company is the leader in lignocellulose ethanol production? What is its current production scale? 5. What are the problems and challenges with algal biofuels? Can it be a viable alternative to land-based biomasses? 6. In accordance to this review article, what is ‘electrofuel’? Why is it better than other forms of biofuels? 7. As outlined in the article, how many pathways are there to fix CO2? 8. What is ‘PHA’? Please outline the biosynthetic pathway of PHA.
 * Questions for the whole class: **

The second set of questions is directly related to the PNAS paper: 1. Please make sure you go the journal’s website and get all the supporting documents. 2. From all the results, please summarize them into three major highlights. 3. Please explain each section of the results and discuss the goal, approach, experimental design, major finding, controls used, and weakness of the experimental design in detail. 4. What is next in this line of research? 5. This is a typical synthetic biology paper. List three technology tools that you feel best represent the power of synthetic biology approaches.

1. If you are the PI of this paper, and you want to start a company based on this discovery, what do you need to do to make your company a success?
 * Questions for the discussion leader Amelia: **