UC Davis, U of Tokyo Collaborating on Algae Biofuels

January 20, 2012
AlgaeIndustryMagazine.com

reen Car Congress reports that a new joint project between UC Davis and the University of Tokyo, Japan, aims at a better understanding of how algae can be used to make biofuels. It is one of four new grants, jointly funded by the US National Science Foundation and the Japan Science and Technology Agency, to develop environment-friendly fuels and reduce pesticide use.

The four grants, totaling $12 million (¥960 million), will be divided between the Japanese and US laboratories. UC Davis’ share will be about $1.5 million over three years, with the possibility of renewal for another two years.

All four projects are based on metabolomics, an approach that uses high-tech analysis to understand all the chemicals involved in a living cell’s metabolism.

“We want to understand all the metabolic pathways, which are used under which conditions, and understand the traffic through the cell,” said Oliver Fiehn, professor at the UC Davis Genome Center and Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, who will lead the UC Davis project with Masanori Arita of the University of Tokyo.

The team will separate the complex mixtures of sugars, other carbohydrates, fats and oils made by the algae. Then they will develop software to identify the thousands of compounds and put them into a database run by Arita’s research group in Japan.

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