Building a Better Bacterium for Butanol

A group of University of Alberta students have spent the summer working on building a new kind of bacteria: one that might hold some answers to the planet's diminishing supply of fossil fuels.The team members - who call themselves the Buta-nerds - have been working on a way to create an organism that will produce butanol fuel for an annual competition hosted by MIT. The International Genetically Engineered Machine competition invites researchers from all over the world to address the question, "Can simple biological systems be built from standard, interchangeable parts and operated in living cells?"