Research team at University of California Santa Cruz seeks funding for competition entry.
A team of 24 teachers and students at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) has created a crowdfunding request to help it further its research into a food waste-to-energy technique.
Describing themselves as “bioengineers, biochemists, MCD (molecular, cell and developmental) biologists and a group of passionate undergraduates,” the group of 24 people is attempting to raise several thousand dollars to help them strengthen their presentation at the iGEM Giant Jamboree, which will be held in Boston Sept. 24-28, 2015.
The research the group is conducting in the summer of 2015 and for the September event in Boston are part of the iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machine) program, which “provides students the opportunity to experience a real laboratory environment as well as design their own experiments,” according to the crowdfunding request.
The UCSC group writes, “Our project focuses on engineering a micro-organism to improve biofuel production. Our biofuel will rely on cellulose from food waste, and can substitute in directly for current gasoline.”
Specifically, the group has identified Haloferax volcanii as “a robust organism with a high tolerance for extreme salt environments that can withstand the fermentation and deconstruction processes. Using H.Volcanii is beneficial to the future of biofuel production since it will not die post-production like most other organisms; it is easier to work with pre-processing and thus creates a sustainable and carbon-neutral process.”
The group says its end product will be biofuel, which will “still emit CO2 but won’t add new carbon into the climate, since the fuel’s carbon comes from plants instead of ancient fossil fuels. Our target biofuels provide comparable amounts of energy to gasoline, can be used in current infrastructure and burns substantially cleaner.”
Additional information on the UCSC iGEM team’s research can be found at https://igem.soe.ucsc.edu/.