The Government of India and the UK will jointly launch a research programme worth £10 million in the area of sustainable bioenergy. This was announced by the Minister of State for Universities and Science, David Willets.
For the purpose of research, both the governments will contribute their expertise to provide solutions to problems arising in the production and processing of algae and plant for the purpose of bioenergy. This in turn will help both the countries to identify other sources of fossil fuels.
The research programme will be particularly supported by the Department of Biotechnology of India and the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. While India’s biotechnology department will be responsible for the Indian side of the programme, the biotechnology department of UK will be responsible for the UK side. Both the governments recently held a workshop in India’s capital New Delhi, in which experts and the research community in general participated and came to a conclusion on the specific areas where collaboration could be achieved.
As a result, three specific areas of possible collaboration were identified namely, identifying, characterising and enhancing new enzymes for plant and algae processing for the purpose of bioenergy, using systems and synthetic biology for the development of microbes that have the capability of producing biofuels from sugars found in the indigestible areas of algae and woody plants and using genomics for enhancing the feasibility of algae to produce bioenergy. The project will also be funded by partners from both the countries.
Source: http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk