According to a collaboration led by the Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), they have successfully developed a microbe that can produce an advanced biofuel directly from biomass.
Making use of synthetic biology, the JBEI researchers have engineered a strain of Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria to produce biodiesel fuel and other important chemicals that are derived from fatty acids.
The Chief Executive Officer for JBEI, Jay Keasling said that the fact that microbes can produce a diesel fuel directly from biomass with no additional chemical modifications is exciting and important and a leading scientific authority on synthetic biology.
The costs of recovering biodiesel are nowhere near the costs required to distill ethanol, leading to the fact that these new results can significantly produce scalable and cost effective advanced biofuels and renewable chemicals.
According to scientific studies, liquid fuels derived from plant biomass are one of the best alternative fuels, if a cost-effective means of commercial production can be found.
Most of these Fuels and chemicals have been produced from the fatty acids in plant and animal oils. These oils now serve as the raw materials not only for biodiesel fuel, but also for a wide range of important chemical products including surfactants, solvents and lubricants.
The JBEI researchers have diverted fatty acid metabolism toward the production of fuels and other chemicals from glucose, and successfully engineered their new strain of E. coli to produce hemicellulases — enzymes that are able to ferment hemicellulose, the complex sugars that are a major constituent of cellulosic biomass and a prime repository for the energy locked within plant cell walls. This could definitely lead to a new era of generation of cheap electricity from biofuel.
Technorati Tags: Microbes,Biomass,Energy,BioEnergy,JBEI,biology,Escherichia,bacteria,
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