Lawrence Berkeley Lab's JBEI spins out first biofuels company: Lygos

The Joint BioEnergy Institute of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has spun out its first business, a cellulosic biofuel company named Lygos.
Emeryville’s JBEI is led by Jay Keasling, who is one of the five men who started Lygos. The JBEI itself was started in 2007 and will likely be moved from Emeryville into the lab’s new campus, now planned for the Richmond Field Station along San Francisco Bay.
Lygos has so far used sugar as a feedstock to create fuel -- or “petrochemical replacements” -- on a laboratory scale. The process it uses to make the chemicals is itself “nearly carbon neutral,” the lab said.