Biofuels craze and the promise of new funding brings new researchers into the field.

Pat McCaffrey

For many people, the word biotechnology brings to mind genetically modified organisms or new treatments for disease. But at MIT, biologists are thinking about how biotech can one day help fuel your car, turn on your lights, or power your computer.

Biologists are becoming an important part of MIT’s new energy initiative, a campus-wide research and education program announced by President Susan Hockfield last fall. The goal is to rally the MIT community around what Hockfield says is the greatest single challenge facing our nation and the world in the 21st century—how to provide enough energy, cheaply and where it’s needed, with minimal environmental impacts.

For now, the initiative is just a virtual center that brings together faculty, students, and staff from all of MIT’s schools, but fundraising is underway to build a new energy research center and provide new grants. And that has lured people from outside of the traditional energy field.

Biologists aren’t new to energy research. When oil prices spiked 25 years ago, many began looking for ways to use microbes to convert plant material into fuel, mostly in the form of ethanol. But as oil prices dropped, biofuel funding dried up and most researchers turned to other projects.

This time, the stakes are higher. Global warming is a reality and even oil industry-friendly President George Bush has been calling on the country to wean itself off of oil. Funding is beginning to flow once more, and in response, MIT biologists and engineers are turning their genetic engineering skills to harvesting usable energy from plants or even directly from the sun.

“We are more used to thinking of medical applications,” says Gregory Stephanopoulos, a chemical engineering professor at MIT. “Yet the tools and methods that have been developed in biology in the last 10 to 15 years are just as applicable to other fields, one of which is energy. These are enabling technologies, and it’s only natural that we’d apply them to producing energy.”

Ethanol powerhouse

Stephanopoulos has developed techniques to reprogram the metabolic pathways of yeast and bacteria to turn them into more-efficient ethanol factories. He brings recombinant DNA technology, genomics, proteomics, and systems biology to energy research.

And he’s bringing other biologists with him into the field. Stephanopoulos showed up one day at the office of Whitehead biologist Gerald Fink and quickly convinced Fink to join him in some genetic fine-tuning of yeast. The result was organisms that can withstand both high levels of sugar and high levels of ethanol that are present during the microbial fermentation of plant sugars. The work appeared last December in Science.

By some standards, Stephanopoulos is a newcomer to the field. He’s been working on energy applications for less than two years. MIT biology professor Anthony Sinskey dates his work on biofuels back to the last oil crisis, when his group had a large program on converting cellulose from plants to ethanol.

Now, Sinskey is returning to the problem with better tools and is pursuing a different goal. With a grant from a major oil company, he’s trying to get bacteria to go beyond ethanol and produce longer chain alcohols as fuel. These fuels carry more energy than ethanol and are more readily integrated into the current fuel supply system.

Spinach power

Shuguang Zhang, the associate director of MIT’s Center for Biomedical Engineering, thinks solar energy is the ultimate prize, and he’s interested in using plants to harvest it for human use. Zhang collaborated with MIT electrical engineer Marc Baldo to coat semiconductor chips with light-harvesting photosynthetic proteins from spinach. Their system converted light into electricity. Zhang envisions the chips on rooftops, walls, cars, mobile phones, and computers.

Zhang is so convinced that energy is the defining scientific problem of the coming decades that he’s shifting a significant part of his lab to work on energy biomaterials, despite having little grant support for the projects yet.

Indeed, funding is the key challenge for MIT’s new energy research program. One hope was British Petroleum, which is investing $500 million over 10 years in an energy biosciences institute. MIT was in the running for the center but lost out, according to MIT chemical engineering professor Charles Cooney. Earlier this month, BP announced the funding would go to the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Illinois, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

But, Cooney says, MIT has also applied for a $125 million from the Department of Energy to build a bioenergy research center. The winners of that grant will be named this summer.