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Craig Venter Gets to Work on Saving the World with Algae

Jul 15, 2009

Craig Venter's company, Synthetic Genomics, has struck a deal with ExxonMobil to develop biofuels from algae. Under the $600 million partnership, SGI will develop fuels that cars and planes can use without having a modified engine. A new facility will be built in San Diego to house ponds and bioreactors for the algae. "We will be trying out these different approaches … using newly-discovered natural algae to test the best approaches we can come up with to go into a scale-up mode," Venter says in the Guardian.

Breaking News
The Scan

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Rare Heart Inflammation Warning

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Sandwich Sampling

The New York Times sent tuna sandwiches for PCR analysis.

Nature Papers Describe Gut Viruses, New Format for Storing Quantitative Genomic Data, More

In Nature this week: catalog of DNA viruses of the human gut microbiome, new dense depth data dump format to store quantitative genomic data, and more.