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Global scientific consensus agrees that to prevent catastrophic climate change and the endangerement of human civilisation less carbon dioxide must be produce on a phenomenal scale. The only realistic option to the problem is for society to move away from fossil fuels as an energy source, both for heating and for transport. The use of fossil fuel alternatives for transport is highly controversial because of the cost of switching over to them, yet the prices of petrol and diesel are kept low and supply constant because of the need for a wide variety of other chemicals that come in them. These chemicals are used for a huge range of purposes, including virtually all plastics, solvent, lubricants as well as food and perfume additives. For lots of these chemicals there is no other way to get them except in crude oil and so this stops people from moving away from petrol and diesel because it is still cheap and easy to get hold of.

What we try to do at the Centre for Sustainable Chemical Technologies (CSCT) is try to combine lots of different areas of science to answer big questions like this. I mainly work as a genetic engineer but closely with lots of chemical engineers and chemists and what we are trying to do is to ‘re-engineer’ yeasts to convert ‘renewable feedstocks’, a fancy way of saying waste or plant material that is cheap and easy to get hold of, into these high value chemicals that can only be found in oil to create a new green supply of these chemicals.

We are interested in the minute in yeasts because they are often found on fruits and flowers and help to makes normally made by flowers. Some of these are very similar to those used to make perfume that are normally found in crude oil. This gives us a  good place to start as some of the work is already done for us in making these complicated chemicals.

A major part is screening lots of natural yeast for different levels of chemical production.

Screening lots of yeasts, lots,

Looking at what they make:

Cloning in new genes so they make more or different chemicals. Making the DNA for cloning:

Looking for successful clones, sometimes there are lots,

So many it can get boring, so we have to find ways to keep it interesting.

We then have to look to see if the gene is working.