More than one year after UC Berkeley signed its $500 million deal with energy giant BP, the partnership has produced studies geared toward improving and implementing biofuel technologies.

About 51 different projects are currently funded by the deal, which provided $20 million for research last year, said Chris Somerville, a professor of plant and microbial biology and the director of the Energy Biosciences Institute, which is funded by BP.

The institute, which comprises 120 faculty members and 170 students looks into the possibility of making fuel from the cellulosic material of plants, Somerville said.

"This whole project is aimed at reducing the use of fossil fuel and transportation," said John Taylor, a UC Berkeley professor of plant and microbial biology whose work is funded by the biosciences institute. "(We) use plants that are CO2 neutral to make ethanol or alkanes."

Taylor is working with Louise Glass and Thomas Bruns, both UC Berkeley professors of plant and microbial biology, to find a fungus that breaks down plant cell walls efficiently. They hope to use the enzyme found in the fungus to speed up the process of producing biofuels.

"Because it's a model organism, we can use molecular genetics to understand how it breaks down plant cell walls and put other enzymes into this fungus," Taylor said. "We want to understand how fungi regulate their genes when they're breaking down plant cell walls."

The funding has also gone toward research to assess the possible effects of the biofuel industry on the economy.

David Zilberman, UC Berkeley professor of agriculture and resource economics, said he used his grant to look at the economic relationship between biofuels and consumers.

"The BP deal allowed me to ask a lot of questions of the link between energy and agriculture and energy and the environment that I always wanted to ask and I didn't have the resources," he said. "What my

analysis shows is that the way you manage your biofuels can affect the environment and the food situation differently."

In his research, Zilberman found that under a strong greenhouse gas policy which taxes emissions, there are likely to be cleaner biofuels.

In addition to producing new biofuel research, the BP deal has brought up the issue of corporate funding and the open nature of research at public institutions in classes on campus.

"There are parts of the economic system that are funding the university that aren't terribly interested in change in the system," said Professor Richard Norgaard, who taught a class about the interaction between religion and science. "While the university used to be public space in which we could raise public questions, it is less so now."

Tags: RESEARCH, ALTERNATIVE ENERGY, BP