Fuels, chemicals, and consumables that are required for our society to function are derived off carbon from fossil fuels like oil, gas, coal, etc. Biorenewable research seeks to develop analogous products from biomass. The new technologies required for biomass to replace fossil fuels include protein engineering, microbial metabolic engineering,  and synthetic biology. In our laboratory, the research areas span all of the above areas. We use different kinds of molecular biology tools, bioinformatics and computational biology, to engineer and evolve proteins and microbes and interpret the sequence of the evolved mutants to gain a better understanding of function.