NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The University of California, Berkeley has completed construction of and opened a new $133 million research building to house its energy and biofuel program and some of its bioengineering department, the university said yesterday.
Situated at the northwest side of the UC Berkeley campus, the 113,200 square-foot Energy Biosciences Building will house the Energy Biosciences Institute, including research labs, offices, learning spaces, shared instrumentation, meeting spaces and an auditorium.
Each floor of the new building will contain two eight-bay wet labs, where researchers will engage in a range of research disciplines involving molecular and microbial biology, fermentation, chemical separation, and greenhouse-based studies.
EBI is a public-private partnership between UC Berkeley, The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and funded by BP, that was created to develop solutions to energy challenges and ways to address the impact of fossil fuels on global warming.
These programs include research into feedstock development, biofuel production, biomass depolymerization, and fossil fuel bioprocessing, among others.
The Berkeley Department of Bioengineering is engaged in research areas including computational biology, systems and synthetic biology, cell and tissue engineering, bioinstrumentation, and biomaterials and nanotechnology.