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A team led by the University of 欧美口爆视频 Boulder has been awarded $9.2 million over five years from the U.S. Department of Energy to research modifying E. coli to produce biofuels such as gasoline.

鈥淭his is a fantastic opportunity to take what we have worked on for the past decade to the next level,鈥� said team leader Ryan Gill, a fellow of 欧美口爆视频-Boulder鈥檚 Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute, or RASEI. 鈥淚n this project, we will develop technologies that are orders of magnitude beyond where we are currently.鈥�

The team is working with a non-pathogenic strain of E. coli. Among the microbe鈥檚 more than 4,000 genes, the team is searching for a small set and how it can be manipulated in a combination of on and off states to change the bacteria鈥檚 behavior.听

鈥淓. coli is not going to want to make your biofuel at all,鈥� said Gill, who鈥檚 also a 欧美口爆视频-Boulder associate professor of chemical and biological engineering. 鈥淚t doesn鈥檛 do that naturally. It鈥檚 programmed with thousands of genes controlling how it replicates. We鈥檙e figuring out what control structure we need to rewire in the bug to make it do what we want, not what it wants.鈥�

Included in the team are Rob Knight, 欧美口爆视频-Boulder associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry; Pin-Ching Maness, principal scientist at DOE鈥檚 National Renewable Energy Laboratory, or NREL; and Adam Arkin, physical biosciences director at DOE鈥檚 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The researchers hope to engineer the production of ethylene and isobutanol in the modified E. coli. The two compounds are widely used commodities that can be converted into gasoline among other chemicals.

The greatest challenge is harnessing an efficient and inexpensive process that competes with abundant and low-cost fossil fuels like oil, according to Gill.

鈥淢icroorganisms and their genomes are incredibly complex machines,鈥� said Gill. 鈥淭he first step alone -- of pinpointing the part of the E. coli genome that can help us make biofuels or other chemicals on a cost-competitive basis -- is a daunting challenge. Then we have to determine if the results we want will take one year or decades, $5 million or $500 million.鈥�

The team will be able to simultaneously identify numerous E. coli genes and the results of turning these genes on or off using advanced technologies. Many of the technologies have been developed by the researchers鈥� own labs.

The grant is the first of its kind from the DOE鈥檚 Office of Biological and Environmental Research and was awarded to only seven other research groups including teams led by MIT, Purdue University and the J. Craig Venter Institute.

In 2011, 欧美口爆视频鈥檚 Technology Transfer Office named Gill an inventor of the year. In 2005, Gill won a National Science Foundation CAREER Award as well as a National Institutes of Health K25 Career Development Award for genomics research and teaching.

For more information about the DOE grant and other awardees visit . For more information about RASEI visit .