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Garbage bug may help lower the cost of biofuel
http://research.aces.illinois.edu/content/garbage-bug-may-help-lower-cost-biofuel[font face=Serif][font size=5]Garbage bug may help lower the cost of biofuel[/font]
Published November 29, 2012
[font size=3] URBANA – One reason that biofuels are expensive to make is that the organisms used to ferment the biomass cannot make effective use of hemicellulose, the next most abundant cell wall component after cellulose. They convert only the glucose in the cellulose, thus using less than half of the available plant material.
“Here at the EBI and other places in the biofuel world, people are trying to engineer microbes that can use both,” said University of Illinois microbiologist Isaac Cann. “Most of the time what they do is they take genes from different locations and try and stitch all of them together to create a pathway that will allow that microbe to use the other sugar.”
Cann and Rod Mackie, also a U of I microbiologist, have been doing research at the Energy Biosciences Institute on an organism that they think could be used to solve this problem.
Mackie, a long-distance runner, found the microbe in the garbage dump of a canning plant while running in Hoopeston, Ill., in 1993. He noticed that the ground was literally bubbling with microbial activity and took samples. He and his son Kevin, who was in high school at the time, isolated microbes from the samples.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1074/jbc.M112.391532Published November 29, 2012
[font size=3] URBANA – One reason that biofuels are expensive to make is that the organisms used to ferment the biomass cannot make effective use of hemicellulose, the next most abundant cell wall component after cellulose. They convert only the glucose in the cellulose, thus using less than half of the available plant material.
“Here at the EBI and other places in the biofuel world, people are trying to engineer microbes that can use both,” said University of Illinois microbiologist Isaac Cann. “Most of the time what they do is they take genes from different locations and try and stitch all of them together to create a pathway that will allow that microbe to use the other sugar.”
Cann and Rod Mackie, also a U of I microbiologist, have been doing research at the Energy Biosciences Institute on an organism that they think could be used to solve this problem.
Mackie, a long-distance runner, found the microbe in the garbage dump of a canning plant while running in Hoopeston, Ill., in 1993. He noticed that the ground was literally bubbling with microbial activity and took samples. He and his son Kevin, who was in high school at the time, isolated microbes from the samples.
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