ABPDU intern Zarian Jacka, a senior at Berkeley High School, won best oral presentation prize at Biotech Partners’ 2023 BRAVO! Poster Exhibition and Celebration on August 12.
As part of the Biotech Partners program, Jacka completed a 10-week summer internship focused on understanding the impacts of feedstock variability on corn stover’s bioconversion efficiency. His work, supervised by ABPDU postdoctoral scholar Xihui Kang, was part of a Feedstock-Conversion Interface Consortium project.
While at ABPDU, Jacka prepared corn stover (stalks, leaves and cobs that remain in fields after corn is harvested) samples for enzymatic hydrolysis and fermentation and used high-performance liquid chromatography to assess the sugar concentration in the resulting hydrolysate. This was used in microbial fermentation to produce bisabolene, a precursor of sustainable aviation fuel.
Jacka’s poster describing this work was chosen for best oral presentation prize among 70 participants at the competition.