DOE Bioenergy Research Centers
What are the Centers?
To focus the most advanced biotechnology-based resources on the biological challenges of biofuel production, DOE established three Bioenergy Research Centers (BRCs) in September 2007. Each center is pursuing the basic research underlying a range of high-risk, high-return biological solutions for bioenergy applications. Advances resulting from the BRCs will provide the knowledge needed to develop new biobased products, methods, and tools that the emerging biofuel industry can use.
The scientific rationale for these centers and for other fundamental genomic research critical to the biofuel industry was established at aDEO workshop involving members of the research community. The DOE BRCs have developed automated, high-throughput analysis pipelines that will accelerate scientific discovery for biology-based biofuel research.
The ultimate goal for the three DOE Bioenergy Research Centers is to better understand the biological mechanisms underlying biofuel production so that those mechanisms can be redesigned, improved, and used to develop novel, efficient bioenergy strategies that can be replicated on a mass scale. New strategies and findings emanating from the centers’ fundamental research ultimately will benefit all biological investigations and will create the knowledge underlying three grand challenges at the frontiers of biology:
- Development of next-generation bioenergy crops
- Discovery and design of enzymes and microbes with novel biomass-degrading capabilities
- Development of transformational microbe-mediated strategies for biofuel production
source: http://genomicscience.energy.gov
