THE BREN SCHOOL OF Environmental Science & Management
at the University of California, Santa Barbara

Presents

"Systems Biology: The New Frontier for Bioenergy"

Hosted by Patricia Holden

Abstract

Environmental biotechnology encompasses a wide range of characterization, monitoring and control or bioenergy technologies that are based on biological processes. Recent breakthroughs in our understanding of biogeochemical processes and genomics are leading to exciting new and cost effective ways to monitor and manipulate the environment and potentially produce bioenergy fuels. Indeed, our ability to sequence an entire microbial genome in just a few hours is leading to similar breakthroughs in characterizing proteomes, metabolomes, phenotypes, and fluxes for organisms, populations, and communities. Understanding and modeling functional microbial community structure and stress responses in soil environments has tremendous implications for our fundamental understanding of biogeochemistry and the potential for making biofuel breakthroughs. Monitoring techniques that inventory and monitor terminal electron acceptors and electron donors, enzyme probes that measure functional activity in the environment or bioreactor, functional genomic microarrays, phylogenetic microarrays, metabolomics, proteomics, and quantitative PCR are also being rapidly adapted for studies in bioenergy. Integration of all of these new high throughput techniques using the latest advances in bioinformatics and modeling will enable break-through science in bioenergy. A review of these techniques with examples and how they are being applied in the Joint BioEnergy Institute will be discussed.

Biography

Dr. Hazen received his BS and MS degrees in Interdepartmental Biology from Michigan State University, and his PhD in Microbial Ecology from Wake Forest University. Dr. Hazen was Professor, Chairman of Biology and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Puerto Rico for eight years. He is currently Head of the Ecology Department and the Center for Environmental Biotechnology, Co-Director of the Virtual Institute for Microbial Stress and Survival, and DOE BER Distinguished Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and has authored more than 199 scientific publications, plus more than 700 abstracts and chapters in several books. Dr. Hazen is also currently the director of the Microbial Community Section of the new Joint BioEnergy Institute at LBNL. He has five patents that have been licensed by more than 50 companies and are being used worldwide. He has also received 2 R&D100 awards and the Federal Technology Transfer Medal. His research is focused on microbial ecology as it relates to bioenergy, bioremediation, and environmental biotechnology.

__________________________________________________________________________________

To join the "bren-alerts" mailing list and receive regular announcements about Bren School news and events, or to manage your bren-alerts account, go to http://www.bren.ucsb.edu/services/computing/bren-alerts.htm

To see a complete list of currently scheduled Bren events, visit http://www.bren.ucsb.edu/news/all_events.htm

To have an event considered for distribution via bren-alerts, send e-mail to media@bren.ucsb.edu

For more information or for assistance in accommodating a disability, please contact BJ Danetra

To find out how to support the Bren School, please contact Jennifer Purcell Deacon