Bio Architecture Lab sees seaweed in biofuels Biofuels

Scientists in a cluttered Berkeley laboratory are working a bit of biochemical wizardry to transform ordinary seaweed into biofuels that promise a new source of energy for this oil-dependent nation.

The lab's research has already fueled a startup company whose workers in southern Chile are farming nearly 200 acres of kelp offshore and building a pilot plant that aims to demonstrate it can scale up production rapidly to produce a major source of ethanol and essential chemicals in the very near future.

The raw material is the same waving kelp species that sea otters love in Monterey Bay, but its tough fronds have long proved impossible for common bacteria to digest completely and to ferment into feed stocks for the "green" biofuels the world is seeking in an era of global warming and perilous dependence on oil from other nations.

But that problem has been solved, say the researchers at Bio Architecture Lab, a startup co-founded by its chief scientist, Yasuo Yoshikuni, a biochemist with a doctorate from UC Berkeley. The company's modest offices and laboratory are located next to the railroad tracks along the Berkeley shore where Amtrak trains roar past all day.

"We get used to it," Yoshikuni said as he guided visitors through a maze of small rooms filled with automated fermenters, arrays of chemical beakers and bubbling bottles that jiggled rapidly on shake tables.

$17 million in help

Yoshikuni and the lab's CEO, Daniel Trunfio kept details of their conversion process under the radar for several years until in 2010 the Department of Energy's Advanced Research Project-E awarded the company and Dupont, a joint partner on the project, $17 million to develop their technique for converting seaweed into next-generation biofuels.

The company is also receiving support from Statoil, the giant Norwegian oil and gas company, Trunfio said.

Yoshikuni and his colleagues revealed the complete combination of microbiology and biochemistry techniques for their kelp-to-biofuel formula in a detailed report published today in the journal Science: "An Engineered Microbial Platform for Direct Biofuel Production from Brown Macroalgae."

UC San Diego biologist B. Greg Mitchell, an expert on algae and a leading voice in promoting "microalgae," or ordinary pond scum, as a potential source of biofuels, voiced enthusiasm for the company's work.

"I love it, it's a really important advance," said Mitchell, who is not involved in the venture. "It represents a transformative technology that, given the ability to scale it up, we could have a multitrillion-dollar source of biofuels based on algae."

The macroalgae that Yoshikuni and his lab colleagues are transforming are the familiar kelp whose long air-filled stems and broad floating leaf-like blades are a common form of the brown algae that create spectacular exhibits in aquariums all over the world.

Overcoming an obstacle

But a crucial barrier to converting those seaweeds to biofuel is the toughness of their fibers, which hold four varieties of sugars that must be "digested" in order to be fermented, Yoshikuni explained.

One in particular, called alginate, had proved to be impossibly stubborn to break down - and here is where the creativity of Yoshikuni's team of molecular biologists and biochemists came in.

Attacking the alginate with e-coli, the common gut bacteria, started the process, he explained. Then he and his colleagues discovered how to engineer those bacteria with specific genes from another microbe known as Vibrio splendidus, and the kelp's alginate gave up its resistance to fermentation.

In their report in Science, the researchers in Yoshikuni's lab calculated that their system could convert seaweed into ethanol twice as productively as from sugarcane, which is widely used in Latin America, and five times more effectively than corn - right now the leading source of ethanol in the United States.

Trunfio put it differently. "Globally," he said, "less than 3 percent of the world's coastal waters can produce seaweed capable of replacing over 60 billion gallons of fossil fuels."