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OIL ABUNDANCE WAS A GIFT and allowed the modern chemical industry to make us durable materials, the automobile industry to give us individual freedoms, the airline industry to make the world accessible, and the pharmaceutical industry to treat our ailments. In the process, cheap oil made us lazy and wasteful. Now we enter a new phase of our oil-based culture. View in LinkedIn

SYNBIO VANILLA. SAFFRON AND MORE. "Evolva is about to start marketing yeast-made vanillin, the main component of vanilla. Amaris is working on saffron. Sanofi began commercial production of an essential malaria drug using baker’s yeast genetically modified by Amyris. The drug’s ingredient is usually extracted from a shrub. Amyris is also making a moisturizer for cosmetics that is typically extracted from either olives or shark livers."" " http://lnkd.in/dvUJsGt View in LinkedIn

MY CLIP-PHOTO ESSAY is posted on Twitter: the theme is biomimicry (viruses, bacteria, Kent Thompson, snowflakes, phytoplankton, plants, animals) as seen in current and future architecture, nanobots, and DNA bots. You may recognize some items. " "" "NigelTenFleming@TenFleming View in LinkedIn

75% OF VANILLA EXTRACTS are synthetic. "Today, most vanillin is produced from the petrochemical raw material guaiacol. As of 2001, the annual demand for vanillin was 12,000 tons, but only 1,800 tons of natural vanillin were produced. The remainder was produced by chemical synthesis." Synthetic biology is tackling this with a gene construct for one of the 30+ vanilla variants. " " http://lnkd.in/dccEzFc View in LinkedIn

SAUDI SEQUENCING INITIATIVE. "Up to 100,000 people in Saudi Arabia are to have their genetic codes mapped in a new human genome project. The research will look at genes linked with diseases, and pave the way for prenatal and premarital screening. The project, funded by the Saudi Arabian national science agency, will create a DNA database to develop personalized medicine."" " http://lnkd.in/dnx2Mq4 View in LinkedIn

SYNBIO FERMENTED RUBBER. "Amyris, a synthetic-biology company in Emeryville, California, agreed to work with French tyre manufacturer Michelin to produce isoprene, the chemical building block used to make synthetic rubber." (2011)." " http://lnkd.in/dgNcfcS View in LinkedIn

THE RUBBER GENE, isoprene synthase, has only been identified so far in rubber trees. Typically plant genes are cumbersome to insert into microorganisms, but synbio engineering has provided a solution to make isoprene. Genencor, together with Goodyear, are working on making natural rubber using synthetic biology by fermentation. " " http://lnkd.in/dFVG-W8 View in LinkedIn

NATURAL RUBBER PRICED BY OIL. "Close to 21 million tons of rubber were produced in 2005, of which approximately 42% was natural. Since the bulk of the rubber produced is of the synthetic variety, which is derived from petroleum, the price of natural rubber is determined, to a large extent, by the prevailing global price of crude oil."" " http://lnkd.in/dvdJA9y View in LinkedIn

SYNTHETIC VS NATURAL RUBBER. Natural rubber comes from rubber trees, and has superior properties; chemically synthesized rubber comes from petroleum byproducts. "About 15 billion kilograms of rubbers are produced annually, and of that amount two thirds is synthetic. Global revenues generated with synthetic rubbers are likely to rise to approx. US$56 billion in 2020."" " http://lnkd.in/dQXAWu7 View in LinkedIn

RUBBER, A LIMITING RESOURCE. Rubber was a limiting strategic material in WWI. "The production of synthetic rubber in the United States expanded greatly during World War II, since the Axis powers controlled nearly all the world's limited supplies of natural rubber. The U.S. government launched a major (and largely secret) effort to improve synthetic rubber production. By 1944, a total of 50 factories were manufacturing synthetic rubber, pouring out...twice that of the world's natural rubber production before the beginning of the war."" " http://lnkd.in/dQXAWu7 View in LinkedIn