Read the full article over at Scientific American here: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=genetically-engineered-stomach-microbe-turns-seaweed-into-ethanol&page=2
A genetically modified strain of common gut bacteria may lead to a new technology for making biofuels that does not compete with food crops for arable acreage.
Researchers at Bio Architecture Lab, Inc., (BAL) and the University of Washington in Seattle have now taken the first step to exploit the natural advantages of seaweed. They have built a microbe capable of digesting it and converting it into ethanol or other fuels or chemicals. Synthetic biologist Yasuo Yoshikuni, a co-founder of BAL, and his colleagues took Escherichia coli, a gut bacterium most famous as a food contaminant, and made some genetic modifications that give it the ability to turn the sugars in an edible kelp called kombu into fuel. They report their findings in the January 20 issue of the journal Science.
The microbe could turn out to be useful for making molecules other than ethanol, such as isobutanol or even the precursors of plastics, Yoshikuni says. “Consider the microbe as the chassis with engineered functional modules,” or pathways to produce a specific molecule, Yoshikuni says. “If we integrate other pathways instead of the ethanol pathway, this microbe can be a platform for converting sugar into a variety of molecules.”
The fact that such a one-stop industrial microbe can turn seaweed into a variety of molecules has attracted the attention of outfits such as the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, or ARPA–e, which has funded BAL work with DuPont to produce other molecules from such engineered microbes. “Because seaweed grows naturally in the ocean, it uses the two thirds of the planet that we don’t use for agriculture,” ARPA–e program director Jonathan Burbaum wrote in an e-mail. “ARPA–e is directing a small portion of the remaining funding toward an aquafarm experiment to measure area productivity and harvest efficiency.”
I think this is a brilliant idea. Even though i am more of a Diesel fanatic, i think that biofuel for Gasoline powered vehicles would hold promise if we found a way to make it from non foodstock items like Seeweed/Kelp. This would allow use of a resource that rots on beaches and is readily available. Read the publication in the Journal of Science here: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6066/308.abstract