MIT centers, laboratories, departments and programs provide a multi-faceted approach to solving the world's energy challenge.
Biotechnology
MIT sits in the middle of an unparalleled concentration of biotechnology activity, much of it spinning out of MIT faculty laboratories. This provides an exceptional opportunity to apply modern biology and biotechnology to a host of energy challenges such as enhanced oil recovery, environmental remediation, carbon dioxide sequestration, new materials and large-scale sustainable biomass utilization for economic production of chemicals and fuels. When the ability to transfer genetic material from one organism to another was established around a quarter century ago, production of chemicals and fuels was a major focus until it was found too challenging and then overtaken by the application to pharmaceuticals. However, interest in energy opportunities has reawakened with the tools of the "new biology." These include genomic sequencing; gene transfer and protein engineering; genomics-based high-throughput technologies such as proteomics and metabolomics; systems biology; and biological engineering techniques such as biological self-assembly.
