Team:Berkeley/HumanPractice/ABPDU

To get an idea of how to scale up our project, the UC Berkeley iGEM team consulted experts at the Advanced Biofuels Process Demonstration Unit (ABPDU) located in Emeryville, California. The ABPDU is a facility affiliated with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and it is designed to help expedite the commercialization of advanced next-generation biofuels by providing industry-scale test beds for discoveries made in the laboratory. We got a chance to talk to Dr. Julio Baez, the program manager of the ABPDU and got insight into factors to consider when scaling up our process.

First, we saw several reactors to perform pretreatment of biomass such as grass, wood, and agricultural residues. Pretreatment of biomass breaks down the “shields” formed by ligin and hemicellulose, thus reducing the degree of polymerization to faciliate rapid and efficient downstream processes.

Next to the reactors for pretreament of biomass, we saw small reactors used for enzymatic saccharification. Saccharification is literally the process of making sugar from starch reserves. As undergraduate researchers used to laboratory scale experiments where five microliters of enzyme is a lot, we were quite impressed with the scale that ABPDU worked on.

Needless to say, the UC Berkeley iGEM team was soon then awestruck to see ABPDU’s bioreactors, which have the capacity to grow bacteria, fungi and yeast up to 300-liters. The bioreactors were equipped with advanced control systems for pH, temperature, dissolved oxygen and other process conditions.

Finally, the team was quite happy to see some familiar equipments for enzyme purification at ABPDU, such as a high-throughput centrifuge, a large column chromatography system for enzyme separation and purification, and protein analysis equipments such as the HPLC and gas mass spectroscopy.

From this educational field trip to ABPDU, we learned how the facility provided material and energy balance data to help develop parameters for expansion from pilot to commercial scale production.

Now, it was our turn to vision the large-scale biosynthetic and dyeing process of indigo…

*The UC Berkeley iGEM team would like to thank Dr. Julio A. Baez for the wonderful and detailed tour of the Advanced Biofuels Process Demonstration Unit (ABPDU).

• "Berkeley Lab Opens Advanced Biofuels Facility « Berkeley Lab News Center." Berkeley Lab News Center RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 22 Sept. 2013.
• Yamashita, Y., Sasaki, C., & Nakamura, Y. (2010). Effective enzyme saccharification and ethanol production from Japanese cedar using various pretreatment methods. Journal of Bioscience and Bioengineering, 110, 79–86.
• Zheng, Y., Pan, Z., & Zhang, R. (2009). Overview of biomass pretreatment for cellulosic ethanol production. International Journal, 2, 51–68. doi:10.3965/j.issn.1934-6344.2009.03.051-068