Rice microbiologist earns major award

George Bennett honored by industrial microbiologists, wins new NSF grant

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

When George Bennett accepts an award for a lifetime of teaching achievement next week, he’ll probably be thinking more about the future than the past.

The man a colleague at Rice’s BioScience Research Collaborative (BRC) characterized as a “quiet giant” will be honored by the Society for Industrial Microbiology at its 60th annual meeting in San Francisco, where he’ll receive the Selman Waksman Outstanding Teaching Award, named for Rutgers’ late antibiotics pioneer and Nobel laureate.

	GEORGE BENNETT

Good news came in duplicate for Bennett recently as he also learned he’d been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to advance the state of the art in producing biofuels – specifically butanol – from the “underutilized” byproducts of soybeans, cottonseed and sunflower seeds.

Bennett, Rice’s E. Dell Butcher Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, is grateful for both the society’s acknowledgement of his achievements and the NSF’s confidence in his work in progress.

“I’m certainly pleased to receive the award,” said Bennett at his BRC office this week. “There are a lot of well-known people who could be named, and I know I’m in pretty good company with the past awardees.”

Bennett will talk at the conference about research related to the NSF-backed project, which involves genetically modifying strains of clostridia and other bacteria to maximize the fermentation of 1-butanol.

Bennett and co-principal investigator Ka-Yiu San have been working for years on biofuels and chemicals. Butanol contains more energy than ethanol and can be used easily in gasoline engines. In the new project, they hope to maximize butanol yields from both natural and genetically modified clostridia and from engineered strains of E. coli.

“I’ve been working on butanol for a long time, and there’s been a lot of interest in it recently,” Bennett said. “It’s a very adaptable fuel molecule, compared with ethanol.”

Clostridia naturally grow on sugars from oil seeds. “There are certain sugars in these seeds that people and animals can’t digest, or that give them difficulties. So typically, those carbohydrates are extracted in processing,” he said. Rather than throw them away, those byproducts represent a sustainable feedstock for butanol and other chemical production. He said his BRC lab hopes to use Texas-bred cottonseed extracts in its research.

Naturally, the program has an educational component. Bennett and San, the E.D. Butcher Professor in Bioengineering and professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, will use the project to train undergraduate and graduate students in biochemical engineering, molecular biology and biochemistry. After-school and summer research experiences will be offered to high school students through Harmony Science Academy, a Houston charter school.

One student who worked in Bennett’s lab, Bellaire High School’s Li Boynton, won an international science fair sponsored by Intel and attended this year’s State of the Union address at the invitation of President and Michelle Obama.

Bennett, who earned his doctorate at Purdue in 1974, delights in watching former students’ progress. Some land in biotechnology firms and government labs and others branch out in ways he could not have predicted.

“It’s good to feel some people have gone on and secured a nice niche in their fields,” he said. “Some of their specialties range wider than you might think. A couple of my students are in charge of DNA forensic labs, like you’d see on ‘CSI.’ … It’s very different from what they were doing here, but new and unanticipated opportunities continually arise for the application of biotechnology. You never know where they’ll all end up.”

Bennett has made great strides in his own research, which incorporates the environmentally friendly “cellular refinery” production of such high-value chemicals as esters, used in solvents, flavor and fragrance additives, and fuel and polymer molecules.

He holds 10 patents, the most significant of which may be for succinic acid, used in plastics, textiles, drugs and solvents and as a food additive. Last year, Rice licensed Bennett and San’s “green” process for bio-based production of succinic acid to a French firm, Roquette Frères, which is developing a demonstration plant and pursuing filings in Brazil, China and Canada.

“It’s nice to have been involved with an industrial group,” Bennett said, acknowledging that it’s rare for academic microbiologists to see their creations scaled up to the industrial level. “We had some great students engaged in that project, and did it with a relatively small amount of funds from the NSF, which was our main sponsor.”

Ultimately, Bennett wants to help maintain Houston’s place as the energy and chemical capital of the world. “People may not be aware that Rice is positioned to lead a local drive in the development of bio applications to the chemical industry,” he said, noting that he and his Rice colleagues have enjoyed high visibility among scientists in Europe, China and Korea. “We would like to enhance our collaborations locally and internationally.”

Microbiology, he said, “fits the societal trend for less environmental impact, improved energy efficiency and generating novel materials. It’s ripe for investment with a high return not only in terms of students’ success, but also for Houston’s economy.”