Butanerds win MIT contest
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By Francois Marchand, The Edmonton Journal
A team of University of Alberta students say they're one step closer to creating a clean and reliable source of butanol, an alternative biofuel.
The 10-member group, who call themselves the "Butanerds," won first prize in the Energy and the Environment category at a prestigious synthetic biology competition held this weekend at Boston's Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"We're all really excited to bring it back to Alberta," said senior team member Justin Pahara. "Everybody welcomed our idea.
"There are certain people working on similar kinds of technology that we were able to chat with and tell them why we thought butanol was better. For the most part, I think they agreed," he said with a laugh.
Pahara's team has been working on manipulating a bacteria similar to E. coli in order to produce butanol, a biofuel that could eventually replace gasoline.
The process is complicated and still rather inefficient, and Pahara's team is working with computer models to see how to increase production levels. "We haven't gotten any further with our lab work," said Pahara, who says the team's focus over the last few months had been to get ready for the competition. "Hopefully, within the next month we'll be producing butanol and we'll have furthered our development of our computer modelling. It's a very complex project."
The Butanerds also received a gold medal for their overall contribution to this weekend's "jamboree" at MIT, as did two other teams from Alberta.
Pahara said he hopes his team, composed of students in a number of different fields -- including engineering and biochemistry -- will have a system that can produce significantly more butanol by the end of next year.
Pahara said the award might help the team get more research funding by showing sponsors how the project was recognized in an international setting.
"It's really hard to talk economics because we don't know what kind of system we're going to end up with," Pahara said. "But you just have to look at oil prices right now: this is why biofuels are being investigated so intensely."
