Amyris has begun selling Biofene®, Amyris’s brand of farnesene, a long-chain branched hydrocarbon, online at farnesene.net. By making initial quantities of its building block molecule available to a broader audience, Amyris seeks to expand Biofene’s use beyond the commercial applications the Company and its partners are already developing.

Amyris is now selling Biofene through its website in 1 kilogram lot sizes (about a quarter of a gallon). Biofene (trans-beta-Farnesene, E,E-Farnesene, CAS 18794-84-8) is a 15 carbon, long-chain, branched, unsaturated hydrocarbon manufactured by the fermentation of plant-sugars using Amyris’s engineered microbes.

Biofene is said to offer unique physical properties and chemical reactivity for new materials and for a variety of applications, including adhesives, surfactants, resins, coatings, vitamin precursors, performance materials and crop protection. Farnesene is an essential oil that is found in small quantities in some plants such as apples, but Amyris has developed a proprietary technology to produce farnesene at industrial scale.