DirectFuel

The Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg participates in the new EU-funded FP7 collaborative project "Direct biological conversion of solar energy to volatile hydrocarbon fuels by engineered cyanobacteria" (Acronym: DirectFuel), starting OCT 1, 2010, with Prof. Wolfgang Hess, Department of Genetics, Faculty of Biology, as the principal investigator. The 9-partner project is coordinated from the University of Turku, Finland and is carried out over 4 years, with a total maximum project funding of 3,729,519 EUR. The consortium includes partners in seven countries: Finland, Germany, UK, USA, Denmark, Italy and the Czech Republic. The DirectFuel project is combining the approaches of systems biology with the tools of synthetic biology to develop a photobiological process for direct conversion of sunlight and CO₂ into engine- and infrastructure-ready transport fuels. The DirectFuel project sets the challenging target of developing a photobiological process for direct conversion of sunlight and CO₂ into engine- and infrastructure-ready transport fuels such as propane. Biological energy-conversion processes are particularly well-suited for production of the hydrocarbon fuel molecules that today's transport industry rely on. However, the natural capability for such a conversion is limited, the task of the DirectFuel project is therefore to construct new metabolic pathways with such capability.