PhD Student Aims at Turning Toxic Wood Pulping Waste into Biofuels

Damien Biot-Pelletier, a Concordia PhD candidate in biology, hopes to revive the pulp and paper industry in Canada through synthetic biology.

His research is looking at transforming sulfite liquor, a toxic by-product of wood pulping, into biofuels. This can turn a pulp or paper mill into biorefineries and generate new streams of income from transforming their waste into energy. In the Centre for Applied Synthetic Biology, Biot-Pelletier is following on the findings of a previous Concordia grad student, Dominic Pinel. Pinel produced a yeast that is resistant to sulfite liquor and transforms sugars into ethanol.

Biot-Pelletier is now trying to discover what exactly made that specific strain of yeast resistant, so the knowledge can be applied to other yeast strains and other toxic mixtures.