Iris Solutions, a consortium led by Orgaworld Canada and a part of the Organics Division of the waste and recycling firm, Shanks Group, has been selected as the proponent for the Surrey Biofuels Processing Facility project in Canada.

The facility will be designed to receive and process 115,000 tonnes of organic waste annually. When completed, it is expected to be the largest of its kind in Canada with a capacity to process 100% of the City's organic waste, along with commercial organic waste.

The facility will use an anaerobic digester to create biogas which can be used to power the city's natural gas waste collection trucks. It will also produce a compost product that will be suitable for landscaping and agricultural applications.

The facility is planned to be fully operational by late 2016.

Lignocellulosic biomass contains high levels of pentose, making it difficult to convert into biofuels than hexose. Thus, increasing the hexose/pentose ratio in biomass is one approach for improvement. The team of Henrik V. Scheller from Joint Bioenergy Institute used genetic engineering to study if the pectic galactan levels can be increased in cell walls of Arabidopsis cells.

The team first overexpressed different plant UDP-glucose 4-epimerases (UGEs) in Arabidopsis. However, no plant UGE could increase the cell wall galactose. The team then simultaneously overexpressed AtUGE2 and the β-1,4-galactan synthase GalS1. This led to an over 80% increase in cell wall galactose in stems. Furthermore, AtUGE2 and GalS1 overexpression in combination with overexpression of the NST1 master regulator for secondary cell wall biosynthesis resulted in thicker of fiber cell walls with high galactose levels. Immunofluorescence microscopy confirmed that increased galactose was present in secondary cell walls.

Simultaneous overexpression of AtUGE2 and GalS1 increased the cell wall galactose compared to the overexpression obtained in either one, alone. The increased galactan in fiber cells also had no impact on plant development. Thus, the gene stacking approach is promising in engineering feedstocks for biofuels.

A team of researchers led by Harvard geneticist George Church at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and Harvard Medical School (HMS) has modified the genes of bacteria that allows them to program what chemical the cells are to produce. Their research was reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

"This advance has implications for pharmaceutical, biofuel, and renewable chemical production," said Wyss Institute Founding Director Donald Ingber.

Their technique makes the desired chemical product vital to the bacteria's survival by making it a requirement in the activation of antibiotic-resistance genes. Only the cells that generate enough of the desired chemical will be completely resistant to the antibiotic and survive to the next round of evolution.

"This is a major direction of growth in synthetic biology, where the focus has mostly been on one-off experiments until this point," said Church.

Iranian researchers from Ferdowsi University of Mashhad succeeded in producing biodiesel fuel from soya oil. They have also proposed a new method for the production of biodiesel by presenting a solid non-homogenous nanocatalyst.

In their study, which was published in Ultrasonics Sonochemistry,  a simple, cost-effective and fast method was proposed for the synthesis of biodiesel through ultrasonic waves by using potassium fluoride–gamma alumina (KF/ γ-Al2O3) nanocatalyst. The fuel was made from soya oil and has the right characteristics to be used as a fuel.

The new nanocatalyst has several advantages which include the ease of separation from the product and the possibility of its recycling and re-use.