Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Laurence Alexander - Jefferies.
Laurence Alexander - Jefferies
I guess first I have two questions about the delay. First of all, I don’t seen any agreement with ADM such as to the extent that their staffing problems have led to the delay that the repayment from the JV to ADM will have some adjustment to it?
Richard Eno
There are no penalties in that part.
Laurence Alexander - Jefferies
I guess secondly, is there sort of any rough rules of thumb for how much the cost might be escalating with brining in some extra consultants to help on the engineering side?
Richard Eno
No, there are no rough rules of thumb, but I would expect the cost of the engineering work will be far less than the cost associated with poor productivity if you don’t have the engineering work done, but there are no rules of thumb. It depends very much on a specific situation at hand.
Laurence Alexander - Jefferies
I guess; thirdly just on the next-generation fermentation, given the delay will you be able to shift the production to the next-generation bug and then bring down the cost structure to whatever it takes?
Joseph Hill
Laurence this is Joseph. We continue to provide a series of our improved organisms and expect to do so for the considerable future. Although we want validate their performance of scale before we introduce them into the Clinton plants and therefore although we expect to be adding new ones there, I think it’s on a case-by-case basis and it depends on the performance scale which has to be validated at the site. Yes, we expect to be introducing the organism.
Laurence Alexander – Jefferies
Lastly Oly, if you wouldn’t mind flashing out a little bit to comment about leveraging your skill set and then searching trades as to what types of opportunities you might be looking at?
Oliver Peoples
Obviously one of the big things happening out there is at least a very real expectation of considerable additional funding for biomass related program. Metabolix has control of one of the most attractive bioenergy core products that can be produced in the biomass crop that would be the future bioplastics.
To do that, it’s just that we’ve developed a very high productivity transformation system for that cost, and they are about to introduce multiple gene systems. Obviously as one looks beyond the PHA trade it’s a potential for developing multi-gene system technologies, which could encompass any number of other factors. For example, I think there’s and awful lot of interest in explaining genetic engineering to produce hydrolytic enzymes to these crops to modify ligament to do a number things.
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