322 results match your criteria: "Energy Biosciences Institute[Affiliation]"

Background: Lignin is an aromatic polymer deposited in secondary cell walls of higher plants to provide strength, rigidity, and hydrophobicity to vascular tissues. Due to its interconnections with cell wall polysaccharides, lignin plays important roles during plant growth and defense, but also has a negative impact on industrial processes aimed at obtaining monosaccharides from plant biomass. Engineering lignin offers a solution to this issue.

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Recommendations for life-cycle assessment of recyclable plastics in a circular economy.

Chem Sci

June 2024

Energy Technologies Area, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory 1 Cyclotron Road Berkeley CA 94720 USA

Technologies that enable plastic circularity offer a path to reducing waste generation, improving environmental quality, and reducing reliance on fossil feedstocks. However, life-cycle assessment (LCA) methods commonly applied to these systems fall far short of capturing the full suite of advantages and tradeoffs. This perspective highlights inconsistencies in both the research questions and methodological choices across the growing body of LCA literature for plastics recycling.

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Matching diverse feedstocks to conversion processes for the future bioeconomy.

Curr Opin Biotechnol

December 2023

Building Technologies and Urban Systems Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, United States.

A wide variety of wasted or underutilized organic feedstocks can be leveraged to build a sustainable bioeconomy, ranging from crop residues to food processor residues and municipal wastes. Leveraging these feedstocks is both high-risk and high-reward. Converting mixed, variable, and/or highly contaminated feedstocks can pose engineering and economic challenges.

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Field performance of switchgrass plants engineered for reduced recalcitrance.

Front Plant Sci

May 2023

Feedstocks and Life-Cycle, Economics and Agronomy Divisions, Joint BioEnergy Institute, Emeryville, CA, United States.

Switchgrass ( L.) is a promising perennial bioenergy crop that achieves high yields with relatively low nutrient and energy inputs. Modification of cell wall composition for reduced recalcitrance can lower the costs of deconstructing biomass to fermentable sugars and other intermediates.

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A large-scale forward genetic screen for maize mutants with altered lignocellulosic properties.

Front Plant Sci

March 2023

Institute for Plant Cell Biology and Biotechnology-Cluster of Excellence on Plant Sciences, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany.

The development of efficient pipelines for the bioconversion of grass lignocellulosic feedstocks is challenging due to the limited understanding of the molecular mechanisms controlling the synthesis, deposition, and degradation of the varying polymers unique to grass cell walls. Here, we describe a large-scale forward genetic approach resulting in the identification of a collection of chemically mutagenized maize mutants with diverse alterations in their cell wall attributes such as crystalline cellulose content or hemicellulose composition. Saccharification yield, i.

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Scalable, low-cost biofuel and biochemical production can accelerate progress on the path to a more circular carbon economy and reduced dependence on crude oil. Rather than producing a single fuel product, lignocellulosic biorefineries have the potential to serve as hubs for the production of fuels, production of petrochemical replacements, and treatment of high-moisture organic waste. A detailed techno-economic analysis and life-cycle greenhouse gas assessment are developed to explore the cost and emission impacts of integrated corn stover-to-ethanol biorefineries that incorporate both codigestion of organic wastes and different strategies for utilizing biogas, including onsite energy generation, upgrading to bio-compressed natural gas (bioCNG), conversion to poly(3-hydroxybutyrate) (PHB) bioplastic, and conversion to single-cell protein (SCP).

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Greenhouse Gas and Air Pollutant Emissions from Composting.

Environ Sci Technol

February 2023

Energy Technologies Area, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 1 Cyclotron Road, Berkeley, California 94720, United States.

Composting can divert organic waste from landfills, reduce landfill methane emissions, and recycle nutrients back to soils. However, the composting process is also a source of greenhouse gas and air pollutant emissions. Researchers, regulators, and policy decision-makers all rely on emissions estimates to develop local emissions inventories and weigh competing waste diversion options, yet reported emission factors are difficult to interpret and highly variable.

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Machine learning for surrogate process models of bioproduction pathways.

Bioresour Technol

February 2023

Life-cycle, Economics, and Agronomy Division, Joint BioEnergy Institute, 5885 Hollis Street, Emeryville, CA 94608, USA; Biosciences Area, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 1 Cyclotron Road, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA; Energy Technologies Area, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 1 Cyclotron Road, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA; Energy & Biosciences Institute, University of California, Berkeley, 282 Koshland Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. Electronic address:

Technoeconomic analysis and life-cycle assessment are critical to guiding and prioritizing bench-scale experiments and to evaluating economic and environmental performance of biofuel or biochemical production processes at scale. Traditionally, commercial process simulation tools have been used to develop detailed models for these purposes. However, developing and running such models can be costly and computationally intensive, which limits the degree to which they can be shared and reproduced in the broader research community.

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Engineering bioenergy crops to accumulate coproducts can increase the value of lignocellulosic biomass and enable a sustainable bioeconomy. In this study, we engineered sorghum with a bacterial gene encoding a chorismate pyruvate-lyase () to reroute the plastidial pool of chorismate from the shikimate pathway into the valuable compound 4-hydroxybenzoic acid (4-HBA). A gene encoding a feedback-resistant version of 3-deoxy-d-arabino-heptulonate-7-phosphate synthase () was also introduced in an attempt to increase the carbon flux through the shikimate pathway.

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Plants and microbes share common metabolic pathways for producing a range of bioproducts that are potentially foundational to the future bioeconomy. However, accumulation and microbial production of bioproducts have never been systematically compared on an economic basis to identify optimal routes of production. A detailed technoeconomic analysis of four exemplar compounds (4-hydroxybenzoic acid [4-HBA], catechol, muconic acid, and 2-pyrone-4,6-dicarboxylic acid [PDC]) is conducted with the highest reported yields and accumulation rates to identify economically advantaged platforms and breakeven targets for plants and microbes.

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Sustainable manufacturing with synthetic biology.

Nat Biotechnol

March 2022

Biological Systems & Engineering Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA.

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Verrucomicrobiotal methanotrophs are thermoacidophilic methane oxidizers that have been isolated from volcanic and geothermal regions of the world. We used a metagenomic approach that entailed obtaining the whole genome sequence of a verrucomicrobiotal methanotroph from a microbial consortium enriched from samples obtained from Nymph Lake (89.9 °C, pH 2.

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Sulfate analog oxyanions that function as selective metabolic inhibitors of dissimilatory sulfate reducing microorganisms (SRM) are widely used in ecological studies and industrial applications. As such, it is important to understand the mode of action and mechanisms of tolerance or adaptation to these compounds. Different oxyanions vary widely in their inhibitory potency and mechanism of inhibition, but current evidence suggests that the sulfate adenylyl transferase/ATP sulfurylase (Sat) enzyme is an important target.

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Diversion of organic waste from landfills offers an opportunity to recover valuable nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus that are typically discarded. Although prior research has explored the potential for buildout of anaerobic digestion (AD) infrastructure to treat organic waste and generate energy, a better understanding is needed of the nutrient recovery potential from the solid and liquid byproducts (digestate) resulting from AD of these waste streams. We quantified the system-wide mass of nutrients that can potentially be recovered in California by integrating current and potential future AD facilities with existing nutrient recovery technologies.

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Accurate nutrient sensing is important for rapid fungal growth and exploitation of available resources. Sulfur is an important nutrient source found in a number of biological macromolecules, including proteins and lipids. The model filamentous fungus Neurospora crassa is capable of utilizing sulfur found in a variety of sources from amino acids to sulfate.

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Ecogenomics of Groundwater Phages Suggests Niche Differentiation Linked to Specific Environmental Tolerance.

mSystems

June 2021

Biological Systems and Engineering, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratorygrid.184769.5, Berkeley, California, USA.

Viruses are ubiquitous microbiome components, shaping ecosystems via strain-specific predation, horizontal gene transfer and redistribution of nutrients through host lysis. Viral impacts are important in groundwater ecosystems, where microbes drive many nutrient fluxes and metabolic processes; however, little is known about the diversity of viruses in these environments. We analyzed four groundwater plasmidomes (the entire plasmid content of an environment) and identified 200 viral sequences, which clustered into 41 genus-level viral clusters (approximately equivalent to viral genera) including 9 known and 32 putative new genera.

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Degradation Products of Complex Arabinoxylans by Enhance the Host Immune Response.

Microorganisms

May 2021

Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology (Microbiome Metabolic Engineering Theme), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA.

spp. of the human colonic microbiome degrade complex arabinoxylans from dietary fiber and release ferulic acid. Several studies have demonstrated the beneficial effects of ferulic acid.

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Leveling the cost and carbon footprint of circular polymers that are chemically recycled to monomer.

Sci Adv

April 2021

Biological Systems and Engineering Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.

Mechanical recycling of polymers downgrades them such that they are unusable after a few cycles. Alternatively, chemical recycling to monomer offers a means to recover the embodied chemical feedstocks for remanufacturing. However, only a limited number of commodity polymers may be chemically recycled, and the processes remain resource intensive.

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The presence of mixed-linkage (1,3;1,4)-β-d-glucan (MLG) in plant cell walls is a key feature of grass species such as cereals, the main source of calorie intake for humans and cattle. Accumulation of this polysaccharide involves the coordinated regulation of biosynthetic and metabolic machineries. While several components of the MLG biosynthesis machinery have been identified in diverse plant species, degradation of MLG is poorly understood.

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Sensing available nutrients and efficiently utilizing them is a challenge common to all organisms. The model filamentous fungus is capable of utilizing a variety of inorganic and organic nitrogen sources. Nitrogen utilization in is regulated by a network of pathway-specific transcription factors that activate genes necessary to utilize specific nitrogen sources in combination with nitrogen catabolite repression regulatory proteins.

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Phosphite is the most energetically favorable chemotrophic electron donor known, with a half-cell potential (') of -650 mV for the PO/PO couple. Since the discovery of microbial dissimilatory phosphite oxidation (DPO) in 2000, the environmental distribution, evolution, and diversity of DPO microorganisms (DPOMs) have remained enigmatic, as only two species have been identified. Here, metagenomic sequencing of phosphite-enriched microbial communities enabled the genome reconstruction and metabolic characterization of 21 additional DPOMs.

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Technoeconomic analysis for biofuels and bioproducts.

Curr Opin Biotechnol

February 2021

Life-cycle, Economics, and Agronomy Division, Joint BioEnergy Institute, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, United States; Biological Systems and Engineering Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, United States.

Technoeconomic analysis (TEA) is an approach for conducting process design and simulation, informed by empirical data, to estimate capital costs, operating costs, mass balances, and energy balances for a commercial scale biorefinery. TEA serves as a useful method to screen potential research priorities, identify cost bottlenecks at the earliest stages of research, and provide the mass and energy data needed to conduct life-cycle environmental assessments. Recent studies have produced new tools and methods to enable faster iteration on potential designs, more robust uncertainty analysis, and greater accessibility through the use of open-source platforms.

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Degradation of complex arabinoxylans by human colonic Bacteroidetes.

Nat Commun

January 2021

Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology (Microbiome Metabolic Engineering Theme), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, 61801, USA.

Some Bacteroidetes and other human colonic bacteria can degrade arabinoxylans, common polysaccharides found in dietary fiber. Previous work has identified gene clusters (polysaccharide-utilization loci, PULs) for degradation of simple arabinoxylans. However, the degradation of complex arabinoxylans (containing side chains such as ferulic acid, a phenolic compound) is poorly understood.

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Sulfide accumulation in oil reservoir fluids (souring) from the activity of sulfate-reducing microorganisms (SRM) is of grave concern because of the associated health and facility failure risks. Here, we present an assessment of tungstate as a selective and potent inhibitor of SRM. Dose-response inhibitor experiments were conducted with a number of SRM isolates and enrichments at 30-80 °C and an increase in the effectiveness of tungstate treatment at higher temperatures was observed.

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Assessment of microbial diversity associated with CH emission from sugarcane vinasse storage and transportation systems.

J Environ Manage

September 2020

Energy Biosciences Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1206 W. Gregory Dr., Urbana, IL, 61801, USA; Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1206 W. Gregory Dr., Urbana, IL, 61801, USA; Department of Animal Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1207 W. Gregory Dr., Urbana, IL, 61801, USA.

Sugarcane bioethanol has favorable energy and greenhouse gas balance, although the production process generates several residues including vinasse, which deserves attention because of its significant methane (CH) emission during storage and transportation stages. Considering that CH emissions are dependent on the structure and abundance of microbial communities, we hypothesized that different vinasse transportation systems would harbor different microbial community composition, resulting in distinct CH patterns. To test this hypothesis, we used high-throughput 16S rRNA sequencing with real-time PCR to evaluate the composition and abundance of microorganisms in the two main systems of vinasse storage and transportation (i.

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