At the University of Illinois, researchers are transforming plants into food, fuel and everyday products — and it all starts with microbes.

The bioeconomy is an economic model that converts renewable biological resources into life essentials. While the idea is simple — turning atmospheric carbon into a microbe-friendly food source and recovering leftover nutrients to repeat the cycle indefinitely — the execution is much more challenging. But for Illinois faculty, the enormous benefits are worth the stakes: these minimal-resource technologies aim to bolster energy security and supply chain resilience, promote resource circularity, and address global challenges like climate change and food insecurity.

Thanks to powerhouse programs in engineering and agriculture, one-of-a-kind production facilities, and an unrivaled capacity to scale their technologies, Illinois is uniquely poised to make a transformative impact on the bioeconomy. Grainger faculty are at the forefront of this movement, expertly integrating their skillsets in synthetic bioengineering, plasma synthesis, electrochemistry, resource recovery and more to convert agricultural waste into biofuels, construct portable nitrogen fixation reactors, and produce food from air.

Here’s how Grainger is driving innovation in the bioeconomy.

A living factory

With a global population expected to reach 9.8 billion by 2050, the pressure is on to increase food production in a landscape with rapidly decreasing supplies of airable land. One promising avenue for tackling this mounting challenge lies in biomanufacturing — a component of the bioeconomy that uses living organisms like plants, algae and microbes to convert organic carbon into food, fuel and other products.

“Biotechnology gives us an ability to manufacture in a different way,” said Ting Lu, professor of bioengineering. “We’re harnessing a living factory — a factory of programmable living organisms that takes up raw materials, processes them, and translates them into something valuable. This is really a microscale factory that is tailorable, adaptive and sustainable.”

Photo Credit: Matthew Monte

Lu is the Illinois lead of Cornucopia, a biomanufacturing initiative funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that aims to produce nutritious, palatable and safe food using minimal resources. The highly interdisciplinary team approached the challenge from a unique angle, using microbes as their feedstock. Their proof-of-concept design — an integrated platform that converts water and air into foodstuffs — has successfully generated a macronutrient-rich biomass that generates minimal waste in the process. This alternative food-production method can be employed anywhere in the world, producing nutrient-dense food from naturally available inputs.

Cornucopia is just one example of Grainger’s aptitude for microbial engineering and fermentation. Since 2014, Illinois has been home to iBioFAB, the country’s first fully integrated biological foundry. It was joined in 2024 by iBioFoundry, the first AI-powered, cloud-accessible public biofoundry and one of five biofoundries funded by the NSF. Developed by chemical and biomolecular engineering professor Huimin Zhao, these next-generation facilities integrate synthetic biology, laboratory automation and AI to accelerate biological engineering. One of their major applications is metabolic engineering, which facilitates the rapid design of microorganisms for biofuels and other bioeconomy-related outputs.

“Continuing to make these biofoundries versatile and publicly accessible will increase our research productivity by several fold; maybe even an order of magnitude,” Zhao said. “This kind of platform will significantly improve the productivity of the entire research ecosystem.”

This commitment to sharing information extends beyond campus — and the continent. The Centre for Precision Fermentation and Sustainability (PreFerS) is a collaboration between Illinois and its partners in Singapore. With several Grainger investigators including Ting Lu, Vijay Singh, Christopher Rao, Huimin Zhao, Jeremy Guest and Na Wei, the center focuses on creating new metabolic pathways in microorganisms that turn readily available forms of organic carbon into nutritious food, allowing countries like Singapore to lessen their dependence on imports.

An ecosystem of innovation

Perhaps Illinois’ greatest advantage lies in its unparalleled range and depth of expertise.

“Illinois is a large public university with expertise spanning nearly every discipline,” Lu said. “That allows us to pursue bold, highly interdisciplinary research by leveraging the breadth of expertise across our campus. Research with this level of impact wouldn’t be possible without collaboration, and our campus has a strong culture of collegiality.”

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Ting Lu

With esteemed programs in crop sciences; food science and human nutrition; chemical and biomolecular engineering; civil and environmental engineering; nuclear, plasma and radiological engineering; agricultural and biological engineering and more, interdisciplinary collaborations aren’t just possible — they’re deeply embedded in some of the university’s most impactful work.

This collaborative research is enhanced by a network of state-of-the-art production facilities including iBioFab and NSF iBioFoundry, the Materials Research Laboratory (MRL), the Integrated Bioprocessing Research Laboratory (IBRL), the Illinois Fermentation and Agriculture Biomanufacturing Hub (iFAB) and the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE).

By integrating its esteemed researchers into this cutting-edge infrastructure, Illinois has cultivated an ecosystem of innovation that allows faculty to rapidly discover, test, learn, translate, and industrialize at a scale unmatched by any peer institution. This framework is crucial for realizing Illinois’ goal of producing valuable products at a practical scale — and what sets it apart.

“Research with this level of impact wouldn’t be possible without collaboration, and our campus has a strong culture of collegiality.” — Ting Lu, Professor of Bioengineering 

“Meeting societal needs from plants requires scaling up massively while also driving down cost,” said Guest, professor and department head of civil and environmental engineering. “We’re making that process lean, efficient and effective enough to provide everyone with the food, fuel and products that they need here and now. Our technology is meant to be scaled, and that doesn’t happen anywhere else.”

Photo Credit: University of Illinois / Michelle Hassel

Grainger faculty are also driving bioeconomic growth through the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI), a national consortium focused on bioenergy crops and sustainable fuel and chemical production. Funded by a $237.9 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), CABBI is one of four Bioenergy Research Centers in the country. Now in its ninth year, the center uses bio-based approaches to develop novel strategies for producing valuable products from renewable substrates. The Urbana-Champaign campus is also home to four of CABBI’s six field testing sites — a further testament to Illinois’ illustrious reputation in agriculture and engineering.

Recovering Resources

While feedstock production and biomanufacturing are integral parts of the global bioeconomy, its circular nature leans heavily on another component: resource recovery. This process extracts valuable materials from organic waste or byproducts and returns them to production, and it’s where civil and environmental engineering shines. 

This is exemplified in the recovery of phosphorus, a common nutrient used in fertilizers. While the United States is the third-largest producer of phosphate rock worldwide, it has relied heavily on Moroccan phosphate imports. But thanks to resource recovery efforts from professors Roland Cusick and Vijay Singh, this dependence may be lessening. Cusick’s recent work has centered on phosphorus recovery from the nutrient dense byproduct streams found at wastewater treatment facilities and corn and soy biorefineries: the extracted phosphorus can be repurposed for agricultural use, reducing nutrient pollution in aquatic environments while bolstering economic circularity.

Associate professor Na Wei tackles a similar problem with a different approach, using synthetic biology and AI-guided protein engineering approaches to develop solutions to economic challenges like resource recovery and water reclamation. Her team’s collaborative research efforts advance biocatalytic processes to unlock the potential of large phytate-rich waste streams, enabling a scalable route toward a circular bioeconomy.

Engineering Impact

Illinois’ work in the bioeconomy sphere has implications for academia, industry and society. For many Grainger faculty, commercializing these transformative technologies is the best way to maximize their global impact. One example is a 2025 collaboration between chemical and biomolecular engineering professor Hong Yang and agricultural and biological engineering professor Yuanhui Zhang, who demonstrated the first production of sustainable aviation fuel from food waste-derived biocrude oil using non-precious metal carbide catalysts. Their revolutionary low-cost, scalable method — which converted leftover salad dressing into a conventional jet fuel alternative — represents an important step toward carbon neutrality.

Another commercial product was forged in the lab of nuclear, plasma and radiological engineering professor Mohan Sankaran. Through his work as a co-investigator of the Cornucopia project, Sankaran expanded the group’s initial food-from-air concept. With help from postdoctoral researcher Mohammad Ali Eslamisaray, the duo developed a patent-pending compact, modular reactor that uses plasma-based methods to generate nitrogen-based fertilizer for agriculture. Generating kilograms of nitrogen product per day, their pioneering device makes on-site nitrogen production a practical and affordable option for smaller and more remote farming operations.

These initiatives and many more benefit from the input of Guest, whose specialty lies in techno-economic analysis: evaluating high-performing systems and pinpointing ways to reduce costs and environmental impacts — quickly. His team supports the technology development side of the bioeconomy circuit, ensuring Grainger innovations will have meaningful, large-scale impact.

“At Illinois we have this pipeline of ‘go, go, go,’” Guest said. “We have so many projects with such tight design-built-test-learn cycles, and we’re doing all the pieces of it to get better and better, as quickly as possible.”

Illinois Grainger Engineering Affiliations

Ting Lu is an Illinois Grainger Engineer professor in the Department of Bioengineering. He holds the Donald Biggar Willett Scholar appointment.

Huimin Zhao is an Illinois Grainger Engineer professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. He holds the Steven L. Miller Chair appointment.

Vijay Singh is an Illinois Grainger Engineer Founder Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering.

Christopher Rao is an Illinois Grainger Engineer professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. He is affiliated with the Materials Research Laboratory. Rao holds the Ray and Beverly Mentzer Professor appointment.

Jeremy Guest is an Illinois Grainger Engineer professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He holds the David C. Crawford Faculty Scholar appointment.

Na Wei is an Illinois Grainger Engineer associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Roland Cusick is an Illinois Grainger Engineer associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Hong Yang is an Illinois Grainger Engineer professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. He is affiliated with the Materials Research Laboratory. Yang holds the Richard C. Alkire Chair appointment.

Mohan Sankaran is an Illinois Grainger Engineering professor in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma and Radiological Engineering. He is affiliated with the Materials Research Laboratory. Sankaran holds the Donald Biggar Willett Professor appointment.