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LS9, another ethanol start-up funded by Khosla

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

On 14 June 08, the Times online ran a story titled: Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol
Silicon Valley is experimenting with bacteria that have been genetically altered to provide 'renewable petroleum'. Within the article one found:

Inside LS9?s cluttered laboratory ? funded by $20 million of start-up capital from investors including Vinod Khosla, the Indian-American entrepreneur who co-founded Sun Micro-systems ? Mr Pal explains that LS9?s bugs are single-cell organisms, each a fraction of a billionth the size of an ant. They start out as industrial yeast or nonpathogenic strains of E. coli, but LS9 modifies them by custom-de-signing their DNA. ?Five to seven years ago, that process would have taken months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,? he says. ?Now it can take weeks and cost maybe $20,000.?

How fast can one say Lonnie Ingram?

See also:

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2006/08/proposition-71-and-87-public-funds-to.html

-->[Earlier this year Khosla announced that he was forming an ethanol
manufacturing company in partnership with a grain-milling firm near
Visalia, south of Fresno. The new company plans to build eight plants that could
produce 440 million gallons of ethanol a year, achieving by itself Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger's goal for California to produce at least 20 percent of
the biofuels the state uses by 2010.

Coincidentally, Khosla announced his new ethanol deal on the same
day in June that Proposition 87 qualified for the November ballot. And on Jan. 27,
state records show, Khosla gave $1.1 million to the initiative's campaign
committee, known as Californians for Clean Alternative Energy, to help it collect
the signatures it needed to qualify.]<--

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2008/01/gm-aligns-with-coskata-on-cellulosic.html

Coskata was founded July 2006 with backing from Khosla Ventures, Advanced Technology Ventures and Great Point Ventures.

Full post as published by IPBiz on June 14, 2008 (boomark / email).