Congratulations to two of our NSF CREATE-IGERT trainees on their recent NSF National Collegiate Inventors & Innovators Alliance (NCIIA) awards!
IGERT Trainee Lucas Arzola and team:
“Inserogen is a biotech startup that aims to commercialize SwiftVax, a technology that enables the use of non-transgenic tobacco plants as protein biofactories. This proprietary technology platform is a disruptive innovation that can revolutionize biomanufacturing. Our capabilities of high-volume, cost-efficient, and accelerated manufacturing would enable the production of live saving vaccines in response to outbreaks, such as the H1N1 pandemic. The SwiftVax manufacturing platform can be customized for production of any high-value recombinant protein, and it would enable new markets in both developed and developing countries.”
IGERT trainee Mark Lemos and team:
Helios - University of California-Davis http://nciia.org/node/1708
“Despite the indisputable need for the development of renewable energy sources, the current options for renewable fuel (ethanol, butanol, biodiesel, methane, and hydrogen) are heavily based on food crops. One promising option is cellulosic biofuels, which have the potential to replace 30% of current demand for transportation fuels. However, the decomposition of cellulosic biomass presents a formidable challenge that requires costly, energy-intensive and environmentally detrimental pretreatment steps….This team is researching the viability of duckweed, a tiny, stem-less monocot plant that grows on the surface of ponds, as a cellulosic biofuel. Duckweed has a 2-3 day doubling time, utilizes non-arable land, can grow all year round and does not require extensive biomass pretreatment for biofuel production.”
If you have news to share with our IGERT community, please let me know and I will circulate to the listserv.
Cheers,
Denneal
Denneal Jamison-McClung, PhD
Associate Director, UC Davis Biotechnology Program
301 Life Sciences, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616
TEL (530) 752-5090 | FAX (530) 752-4125 | dsjamison@ucdavis.edu
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