MCELLBI 100B Lecture Notes - Lecture 26: Ethanol Fermentation, Edge Detection, Metabolic Engineering
3 May 2020
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Synthetic biology: the design and construction of biological organisms (or devices) Weizmann engineering bacterium to produce amounts of solvent directly from sugar inputs, the acetone solvent was in short supply because of wwi, critical in manufacturing gunpowder, so the british were able to make the gunpowder they required. An analogy to computer engineering: how a computer is built and up to a network, cells are built in much of the same way and up to tissues/cultures. A focus on the biochemical pathways that synthesize many molecules important to society. Solar power is sustainable: no way of doing this cheaply, no way of doing this while using land efficiently, but tons of available solar energy. We have excess plant biomass to provide significant energy: 1 ton of cellulosic biomass can be converted into 1-00 gallons of ethanol, this 100 x 10^9 gallon etoh is >50% of current liquid transportation fuel usage.
