Team:Berkeley/HumanPractice/ABPDU

On a sunny Friday afternoon on August 9th, 2013, the UC Berkeley iGEM team went to visit the Advanced Biofuels Process Demonstration Unit (ABPDU) located in Emeryville, California. The ABPDU is a 15,000 square-foot state-of-the art 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.

The ABPDU works closely with DOE’s Bioenergy Research Centers, including the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) located just a floor above. One of the missions of these research centers is to see that scientific advances are translated into commercially viable technologies.

And ABPDU is the fully equipped facility to bridge the gap between laboratory and marketplace, allowing researchers to be better informed of the bottlenecks in the translation of their work into impact on the real world problem.

Excited to see how the facility works, the UC Berkeley iGEM team put on their laboratory safety goggles and followed Dr. Baez into the heart of ABPDU.

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