February • 2010

inside this issue

Seven out of 10 applicants to UC for fall 2010 come from the Los Angeles (27.1%), San Francisco Bay Area (22.2%), Orange County (11.4%) and San Diego/Imperial (7.9%) regions, with 51.3 percent of the 134,000 total applicants coming from suburban communities.
40.6 percent of freshman applicants reported household income of $45,000 or less, and 40.2 percent are first-generation college students.
The average high school GPA of freshman applicants is 3.69.

Joint BioEnergy Institute makes biofuel breakthrough

UC researchers at the Joint BioEnergy Institute have engineered E. coli bacteria to produce a biodiesel fuel directly from biomass.

A combination of increasing energy costs and global warming concerns are driving the quest for new renewable and sustainable transportation fuels. Liquid fuels derived from plant materials are one of the best alternatives if a cost-effective means of commercial production can be found.

“The fact that our microbes can produce a diesel fuel directly from biomass with no additional chemical modifications is exciting and important,” says Jay Keasling, the CEO of JBEI and a leading authority on synthetic biology. “Given that the costs of recovering biodiesel are nowhere near the costs required to distill ethanol, we believe our results can significantly contribute to the ultimate goal of producing scalable and cost-effective advanced biofuels and renewable chemicals.”

JBEI is one of three Bioenergy Research Centers funded by the U.S. Department of Energy to advance the development of the next generation of biofuels. Headquartered in Emeryville, Calif., JBEI is a scientific partnership led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that includes the Sandia National Laboratories, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, the Carnegie Institution for Science (located at Stanford University), and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Learn more about the Berkeley Lab's biofuel research

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