This has been a big week for the U.S. domestic airline industry
and its embrace of environmentally-friendly biofuels. On Monday,
a United Airlines jet completed the first-ever biofuel-powered
commercial flight in the U.S. On Wednesday, Alaska Airlines is
launching the first of 75 flights powered by a 20% biofuel blend
concocted from recycled cooking oil. The problem is that the
cost of these biofuels is so prohibitively expensive -- nearly
six times the cost of regular jet fuel -– that there are no
concrete plans to continue these experiments. But what if there
were a way to generate cheap bioefuels for the airline
transportation industry via synthetic biology, essentially re-
engineering E. coli bacteria so that they become a source of
cheap, sustainable fuel? That’s right, the way to think big is
to think small -- very small. Ever since scientists at the J.
Craig Venter Institute created the first synthetic cell nearly
18 months ago, there’s been tremendous excitement (as well as a
fair amount of trepidation