Introduction to the proceedings of the sixteenth symposium on biotechnology for fuels and chemicals

Biotechnology can be defined as the use of biologically derived materials and biocatalysts to carry out desired transformations from one material to another. These biocatalysts can be enzymes or microorganisms. The transformation may be of raw materials into useful compounds or for the destruction of industrial wastes. One use of biotechnology is for the production of fuels and chemicals. This has been the broad area focused on by this Symposium for the past 16 years. The Symposium on Biotechnology for Fuels and Chemicals presents both applied and fundamental work in this area performed by universities, industries, and government institutions. The goal, whether near term or long term, is to find and demonstrate efficient, economical methods for the use of biotechnology to supply society`s needs for fuels and chemicals. The Symposium allows interactions among the researchers in an intimate setting to foster the interactions that will be necessary to commercialize and use these technologies. Efforts presented include all aspects of the process: the pretreatment and beneficiation of the raw material, the biological conversion in some reactor, the separation and recovery of the desired product, and the treatment of the waste streams from this and earlier legacy processes. There are also efforts of the sensing, monitoring, and control of the process and well and the economic analysis to estimate the overall utility and impact. The Sixteenth Symposium on Biotechnology for Fuels and Chemicals provided a forum for the exchange of ideas. There were 34 oral presentations and 81 poster presentations. These were organized into sessions of thermal, chemical, and biological processing; bioprocessing research; process economics and commercialization; and environmental biotechnology