by Christian Durand (Concordia University) Emerging graduate research at Concordia seeks to turn pulp mills into dynamic biorefineries
How can a struggling industry like pulp and paper in Canada be revived? According to Damien Biot-Pelletier, a Concordia PhD candidate in biology, the answer lies in synthetic biology.
“One of the by-products of pulping wood is what’s called spent sulfite liquor, which is extremely toxic,” says Biot-Pelletier, who participates in BioFuelNet Canada, a network that brings together the Canadian biofuels research community to address the challenges of an advanced biofuels industry.
“What my research is looking at is transforming this toxic product into biofuel. The net result for a pulp or paper mill would be that they could essentially become biorefineries and generate new streams of income from transforming waste and wood into green energy.”
In his lab at the Centre for Applied Synthetic Biology, Biot-Pelletier is building on the findings of a previous Concordia grad student: Dominic Pinel, who produced a strain of yeast that is resistant to sulfite liquor and transforms its sugars into ethanol — a biofuel.
Biot-Pelletier is now trying to discover what exactly made that specific strain of yeast resistant, so the knowledge can be applied to other yeast strains and other toxic mixtures.
“I’m taking the differences between this strain and wild yeast, and reintroducing them into wild yeast to see if it confers resistance and to what degree this is significant,” he says.
“Once this is figured out, it can be used to engineer yeast resistant to toxic mixtures similar to sulfite liquor, and be applied to create biofuels.” READ MORE