To fix carbon, food, energy: fix RuBisCO (the mother of all biofuels challenges)

Biofuels Digest
May 11, 2010 Jim Lane

If Rubisco sounds like a mash-up of “renewable energy” and “Nabisco”, the international food marketer, it is a coincidence but a happy one. For nothing is more key to the future of both than the RuBisCO enzyme.

It was the biochemist Dr. Ganesh Kishore, now the CEO of the Malaysian Life Sciences Capital Fund and formerly Chief Biotechnology Officer of Dupont, who raised the issue at a recent Burrill & Company Limited Partners meeting, when he said that biofuels research, while impressive and laudable, is overly focused on midstream processing technologies and not on the key factor: the appallingly low rate at which plants convert sunlight to energy.

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