Australia-based Licella Fibre Fuels and Canada-based Canfor Pulp Products have signed an agreement to form a joint-venture under the name Licella Pulp Joint Venture. The joint venture will study opportunities to integrate Licella's Catalytic Hydrothermal Reactor (Cat-HTR) upgrading platform into Canfor Pulp's kraft and mechanical pulp mills.

This aims to convert biomass, including wood residues from Canfor Pulp's kraft pulping processes, into biocrude oil to produce biofuels and biochemicals to further optimize their production capacity. In their trials, wood residue streams were successfully converted into a stable biocrude oil. When successful, the Licella Pulp Joint Venture would offer this solution to other Kraft and mechanical pulp mills.

An almost entirely accidental discovery by University of Guelph researchers could transform food and biofuel production and increase carbon capture on farmland. By tweaking a plant's genetic profile, the researchers doubled the plant's growth and increased seed production.

The team studied Arabidopsis and found that inserting a particular corn enzyme caused the plant's growth rate to increase. This could boost yields of important oilseed crops such as canola and soybean, as well as crops such as camelina, which are grown for biofuels.

Their finding, however, came almost by chance. The researchers only noticed that their genetically engineered plants looked much larger than wild type plants. While genetic engineering led to more flowers and pods containing seeds, it did not alter the seed composition.

Fatty alcohols are important chemicals used in detergents, surfactants and personal care products. Biosynthesized fatty alcohol provides a promising alternative to traditional fatty alcohol industry. Harnessing microorganisms for fatty alcohol production could be a new strategy to achieve commercial production levels.

Washington State University researchers introduced a fatty acyl-CoA reductase (FAR), TaFAR1, to directly convert fatty acyl-CoA to fatty alcohol in the yeast Yarrowia lipolytica. Optimizations, including eliminating the fatty alcohol degradation pathway, enhancing TaFAR1 expression, and increasing fatty acyl-CoA supply were also conducted, resulting in 63-fold increase in the fatty alcohol-producing capability in the transgenic yeast.

This study demonstrated the development of a Y. lipolytica fatty alcohol-producing cell factor and explored fatty alcohol-producing capability through genetic modification using FAR and fatty acid metabolism.

Clostridium thermocellum is an anaerobic thermophilic bacterium with the ability to produce ethanol. However, its application as biocatalyst for ethanol production is limited since pyruvate ferredoxin oxidoreductase, which directs pyruvate into the ethanol production pathway, has low affinity to the substrate. Hence, researchers from SRM University in India aimed to enhance the ethanol production of C. thermocellum.

The pyruvate carboxylase (pdc) and alcohol dehydrogenase (adh) genes from Zymomonas mobilis were cloned and transformed to Clostridium thermocellum DSM 1313 to generate recombinant CTH-pdc, CTH-adh and CTH-pdc-adh strains that carried heterologous pdc, adh, and both genes, respectively.

Although both pdc and adh were functional in C. thermocellum, the presence of adh severely limited the growth of the recombinant strains, regardless of the presence of the pdc gene. Whereas, the recombinant CTH-pdc strain showed two-fold increase in pyruvate carboxylase activity and ethanol production when compared with the wild type strain.

Pyruvate decarboxylase gene of the homoethanol pathway from Z. mobilis was functional in recombinant C. thermocellum strain and enhanced its ability to produce ethanol. Strain improvement and bioprocess optimizations may further increase the ethanol production from this recombinant strain.