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Jet fuel, waste plastic are topics for Tuesday's FORNL talk

Carolyn Krause
Special to The Oak Ridger

Producing sustainable fuels and chemicals from renewable or waste carbon using synthetic biology is the topic of a lecture to be presented at noon Tuesday at the University of Tennessee Resource Center, 1201 Oak Ridge Turnpike.

The speaker will be Adam Guss, a genetic and metabolic engineer in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Center for Bioenergy Innovation at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Adam Guss

He will speak on his lab’s work in engineering bacteria to help the center find a way to make sustainable fuel economically for jet aircraft from carbon compounds in bioenergy crops like switchgrass. Biomass fuel is carbon neutral because it has already absorbed the carbon dioxide it will later release when burned.

In addition, his group is engineering bacteria to convert waste plastics broken down chemically into novel building blocks for high-performance polymer products that can be decomposed by bacteria in landfills. Only 5% of plastics are recyclable; plastics that can’t be recycled are major environmental pollutants and are largely made using fossil carbon.

At the in-person “hybrid” meeting hosted by Friends of ORNL, attendees may bring their own lunch. To view the virtual noon lecture, click on the talk title on the homepage of the www.fornl.org website and then click on the Zoom link near the top of the page describing the lecture.

“Climate change mitigation will require the replacement of fossil fuels and chemicals with sustainable ones,” Guss said in describing what he will tell FORNL. “Synthetic biology can be used to create microorganisms that produce sustainable replacements for these fuels and chemicals from renewable feedstocks, but challenges remain.

“Some microbes are able to grow on difficult-to-eat feedstocks like carbon dioxide, plant biomass, and plastics, but these organisms are typically hard to genetically modify. My lab at ORNL specializes in developing genetic engineering tools for these microbes, and then applying these tools to engineer the bacteria to produce fuels and industrial chemicals.

“Using this approach, we are engineering bacteria to eat breakdown products from modern plastics and convert them into next-generation building blocks for high-performance polymers that are also biodegradable. We are also engineering microbes to produce sustainable aviation fuel and discovering new metabolic pathways that can be used for further bioengineering. Using synthetic biology, we are helping to build the foundation for a sustainable future.”

Guss received his Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he studied the electron transport pathways used by archaebacteria to produce methane. As a Microbial Sciences Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University, he explored the phylogenetic and metabolic diversity of non-cultured and rarely cultured bacteria present in the lungs of cystic fibrosis patients.

As a postdoctoral researcher and research scientist with the BioEnergy Science Center at Dartmouth College, Guss improved genetic tools and the metabolic engineering of Clostridium thermocellum for production of biofuels from cellulosic biomass.

His current research uses genetics and synthetic biology to engineer microbes to convert lignocellulosic plant biomass and plastic waste into liquid fuels and other value-added products. He is also the ORNL principal investigator for the Agile BioFoundry and the Bio-optimized Technologies to keep Thermoplastics out of Landfills and the Environment, or BOTTLE, Consortium.