A blog from University of Borås

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Food vs. fuel? No! Food from fuel residuals

Oncom is an Indonesian food, where fungi grow on peanuts and convert carbohydrates to protein. It is popular in Java island, particularly around a city names Bandung. People buy oncom and make different food from it.

It is now a few years that we are working together with the Swedish ethanol plant "Lantmännen Agroetanol" to integrate edible fungi into their process to produce more ethanol and also the fungi biomass. In this project, we have examined several edible fungi and the oncom stain gave the best results to grow on their residual streams and produce both ethanol and fungal biomass. The project is going well and is testing in large (up to 1000-m3) bioreactors. The fungal biomass obtained is examined to be used for both animal/fish feed and also human food. Last week, we had a little party at the university with eating oncom and the fungi in a delecious Indonesian food made by our Indonesian PhD student Lukitawesa.







Tuesday, October 4, 2016

Breaking Bad and Breaking Good

"Breaking Bad" is a name of a TV-series that is available on NETFLIX that got a very high rank among e.g. IMDB. It is about a chemistry teacher who got cancer and then started to use his chemistry knowledge to cook crystal drugs. It is a very interesting series that shows what a chemist can do. I saw some years ago a short conference here in Borås from criminal labb, where many teenagers participated. It shows the teenagers are interested to hot topics and somehow challenging. I believe this series and similar materials can create interest among teenagers to chemistry. We get continuously bad news from journalists about chemicals and how dangerous they are, and it affect interests of the younger generation to chemistry and its relevant fields, although we cannot live without chemicals in all aspects of our lives!

A Breaking Good news from yesterday is about the recent noble prize of Prof. Yoshinori Ohsumi in physiology or medicine who discovered how the recycling of the cells work in the body. It is a "resource recovery" inside the body and a lot of chemistry in advanced level.