Solar Powered Microbes Manufacture Biofuels

esocid alerts us to news that scientists from the University of Texas at Austin have created a microbe capable of making cellulose, which can then be turned into ethanol. The bacteria use sunlight as an energy source, and the cellulose can be harvested without destroying them. Quoting: "The new cyanobacteria produce a relatively pure, gel-like form of cellulose that can be broken down easily into glucose. 'The problem with cellulose harvested from plants is that it's difficult to break down because it's highly crystalline and mixed with lignins [for structure] and other compounds,' Nobles says. He was surprised to discover that the cyanobacteria also secrete large amounts of glucose or sucrose, sugars that can be directly harvested from the organisms."

Precision in Reporting ...

Starts out well ...

AUSTIN, Texas -- A newly created microbe [...]

OK, I severely doubt that. AFAIK, it hasn't happened yet that someone has fired up their pico-dremel, dipped it in a pool of amino acids, and spun a new life form. And if that were the case, that particular item would be the headline-cum-Nobel-prize, and not anything specific you could actually do with it.

So ...
- Maybe it was bred. Perhaps using something sexy like DNA splicing.
- More likely it was newly discovered.
- Most likely, it was identified from one of the nigh endless lists of prior discoveries of beasties that might do something useful, and refined by breeding.

OK, so not created.

Then, going on, it all sounds rather silver bullety. So just some sane basics:

- It's a method for gathering sunlight, like many others. As stated between the lines of TFA, there is a certain amount of sunlight that might be gathered that makes it through the atmosphere and hits earth. This is a good thing ... but considering the amount of energy we as a species use today, mainly in form of oil, sunlight is limited. Or put differently: there's no way we're going to bait-and-switch the sun into doing the job oil does today.

- It's in a lab. A lab is in general a very clean place. The great outside, on the other hand, is a murderous place. Throughout the biosphere, from 11km down to about 6km up, any niche that any beasty might inhabit is fought over, and the winner takes the lion's share. So nice as it is that a beasty has been identified that might be the methadone for our oil, it's going to take same maintenance work for it to thrive. Work ... that is, energy. I'm not saying it's impossible, it just cuts into the efficiency. And at this point, no-one can tell us by how much. Think giant vats of goo that need to be kept lab-clean not to be taken over by the next-better contestant for the given yummy environmental niche. Think lots of people / robots / driving around, using lots of energy maintaining the vats.

Anyhow. Good news, good job, my car is still running on refined crude until further notice. Wake me up when this stuff is at the pumps at two bucks a gallon.

[no, I'm always this grumpy, thanks for asking]

Re:Precision in Reporting ...

It looks like they they need to control the simple sugar secretion problem. This is not only an organism which wastes energy (from its "perspective") for no good reason by making cellulose but also an organism which is considerate enough to potential competitors to give them an easy to use energy source in the form of simple sugars.

The former (the part we want) makes the organism weak but might be manageable. The latter, makes the organism "stupid" and, if it produces large enough quantities of simple sugars to sustain high densities of other microbes feasting on simple sugars, suicidal since secondary metabolites (or simply overwhelmingly high numbers of competitors) will probably make a population of this organism unsustainable.

Not necessarily suicidal

It's not necessarily suicidal.

Cyanobacter are routinely part of lichens, which are a very weird mix of fungi and bacteria capable of photosynthesis. The fungi form a matrix in which the bacteria are trapped, and help collect minerals and moisture for the trapped bacteria.

The arrangement isn't entirely mutually beneficial, from the point of view of the individual bacteria, but from a propagating-the-genes point of view (which in evolution is the only one that matters at all) it does allow the bacteria to live and multiply in some places where it otherwise could not.

And the fungi aren't doing it as some kind of act of kindness, either: fungi can't do photosynthesis on their own, so those lichens growing on rocks and whatnot, well, would die if noone in that arrangement provided food for the fungi too. That's the bacteria's contribution there: those sugars.

At any rate, it's sorta like being inside a living test tube full of nutrients and water. If you don't produce an excess of sugars, the test tube dies. Clearly there's a survival advantage in avoiding that.

From another point of view, fungi are nasty critters, which can only live on organic matter produced by someone else. It may be parasitic (they take other cells apart and eat them) or they can live on dead matter, but nevertheless they absolutely need someone else to manufacture those nutrients for them. Most of those in lichens are a highly specialized and adapted form of parasite. They don't just live off the nutrients that the bacteria excrete, but actually poke the bacteria with tiny filaments and suck the nutrients right out of the living cell. The trapped bacteria are routinely killed in the process, but the colony survives by just allowing them to multiply faster than they're killed.

Again, it's a survival advantage to be able to produce enough of an excess of nutrients, so you can survive (and make enough of a reserve to divide too) even with 3-4 fungal cells around you, all living off you.

Yeah, i know It is tough to read TFA

From YFP (your frickin' post):
"So ...
- Maybe it was bred. Perhaps using something sexy like DNA splicing.
- More likely it was newly discovered.
- Most likely, it was identified from one of the nigh endless lists of prior discoveries of beasties that might do something useful, and refined by breeding.

OK, so not created."

From TFA:
"Nobles made the new cyanobacteria (also known as blue-green algae) by giving them a set of cellulose-making genes from a non-photosynthetic "vinegar" bacterium, Acetobacter xylinum, well known as a prolific cellulose producer."

Compare!

Re:Precision in Reporting ...

The BBC article (which is misreporting the endosymbiont hypothesis badly enough to make Lynn roll in her grave were she not still alive) was actually reporting on an article investigating homologies of cellulose synthases in several species of cyanobacteria. Curiously, the current U of Texas at Austin is not about harnessing native cellulose production by some cyanobacterium but rather about "Transgenic expression of Gluconacetobacter xylinus strain ATCC 53582 cellulose synthase genes in the cyanobacterium Synechococcus leopoliensis strain UTCC 100 [metapress.com]". I guess that they decided that inserting required cellulose biosynthetic enzymes from an organism (apparently) known to produce a lot of cellulose was easier than trying to optimize the miserly levels of cellulose biosynthesis in some cyanobacterium.

Issues with PETA, I'm sure ...

... that is, Protozoa for the Ethical Treatment of Amoebae. Humans don't have the right to enslave bacteria.

What about carbon sequestration?

Has anyone seen any information regarding whether or not this process removes CO2 from the atmosphere in significant amounts? It would seem that if they're making carbohydrates (sugars) that this process would be pulling carbon from the environment to do it, which is another side benefit to the process if non-trivial. In other words, not only do we get usable fuel relatively cleanly, we remove greenhouse gases from the environment at the same time.

By the way, I'd like to remind people that how expensive a process is isn't always the only thing to consider.

Closed Cycle

Combining this technology with algae after treatments like those used by GreenFuel Technologies [greenfuelonline.com] and you have a true closed carbon cycle. Greenfuel uses sunlight and CO2 from power plants to grow massive amounts of algae. The algae grows rapidly because of high concentrations of CO2 and large surface area of the bubbletubes.

Re:Gotta love this gene splicing technology

I imagine that what they'll get is a horse's head in their bed, courtesy of InterGlobalPetroCorp.

Re:Gotta love this gene splicing technology

"These scientists should get a Nobel prize for this, this is way cooler than dynamite or nitroglycerine

The invention of dynamite provided the endowment to establish the prize [wikipedia.org].

Alfred Nobel was a nerd, he loved explosions and was utterly oblivious to human nature. He thought dynamite was so powerfull that people would never use it as a weapon even in all out war. The offer of a peace prize can be seen as anknowledgement by Nobel that he failed to shock people out of fighting each other, OTHOH his delusional view of human nature was the precursor of the current MAD strategy of international politics.

Re:Very large surface area needed

According to the article, the approximate area needed to produce ethanol with corn to fuel all U.S. transportation needs is around 820,000 square miles, an area almost the size of the entire Midwest.

This is why the debate over energy alternatives is so skewed. I don't think any proponent of ethanol claims its the magic solution to all energy needs. The debate is about how we can use our surplus corn to reduce dependence on foreign fossil fuels.

If there is a better source of ethanol that comes around, then so be it. Corn ethanol has stimulated development of the next generation of technology.

Implicit in the parent's argument is the idea that ethanol competes for food crop acres and thus raises prices. That is correct. However, the sensationalist media and proponents of other energy alternatives neglect several components of the equation. One component is the argument that high food prices is bad for the third world. The argument seems confusing when you discover that these are usually the same people that argue farm subsidies are causing food prices to be too low . Recent Wall Street Journal articles indicate that high crop prices are finally stimulating investment in third world agriculture. Another component is the argument that today's high food prices are because of ethanol. This is also confusing because similar price increases have been witnessed in products that have nothing to do with corn production. Rice for example, has shown the same percentage jump and yet does not compete with corn acres. My last point is that fuel prices are a major cost of corn production. If we eliminated ethanol production today, the increase in fuel prices due to reduced dilution from ethanol would mean that food prices would hardly change (if at all). [Note this is a little too simplistic because eliminating ethanol would distribute increased fuel costs over a market broader than agriculture - the net effect is the same].

I am not arguing that tying energy and food production together can't be dangerous. I am arguing that we haven't reached that point. Further, in a sense, energy and food production have always been tied together.

Re:Very large surface area needed

I don't think that was his intention. The area required to farm any useful amount of karma would be around 820,000 square miles.
That's an area almost the size of the entire Midwest.

Re:Very large surface area needed

Err neither of you appear to have read the article.

The figure quoted in the gp is for traditional 'corn' based biofuels. There's a prediction that this process could reduce it to 3.5% of this area that's 28700 Square miles (about the size of South Carolina).

The other fact that's quite interesting in the article is that these bacteria are happy in salt water conditions.... Can you think of any large expanses of salt water around the place?

Re:Very large surface area needed

Gatorade factory?

Re:Very large surface area needed

And we can go further, because simply growing gasoline does not have to be our only solution.

Double fuel mileage and you only need 14350 square miles. Get commuters on more public transit: 12000 square miles. Get 25% of the cars on the road to go electric, 9000 square miles.

Now we're in New Hampshire territory, and that's without doing anything really drastic.

Unfortunately, gasoline isn't going anywhere... even increasing the mileage of our cars would reduce the cost of gas to the point that no one would be developing these alternatives.

Re:Very large surface area needed

Double fuel mileage and you only need 14350 square miles. Get commuters on more public transit: 12000 square miles. Get 25% of the cars on the road to go electric, 9000 square miles.

That might be harder than you think. We're already making cars that go 30mpg. Maximum theoretical milage is around 120mpg [blogspot.com]. Doubling milage would put us at 50% of the theoretical maximum, which would be a very impressive technical feat. Getting more cars off the road would help, but switching to electric just means you're getting your power somewhere else.

Re:Very large surface area needed

We're already making cars that go 30mpg.

That's true, but the CAFE number today is less than that at 27.5. We could double it to 55 without too much heartache by 2020 I would think. Cars would have to get lighter and so safety would be compromised - but if done slowly enough the entire fleet of cars on the road would get lighter together and safety would not be an issue. People would have to accept cars that aren't quite as fast, too. A lot of engine efficiency improvement has gone towards performance instead of efficiency.

switching to electric just means you're getting your power somewhere else.

That is true, but you still wouldn't need as much land to grow a gasoline alternative. You could do whatever was most efficient - maybe even solar cells on the same land area. In short, electric cars give you more options when it comes to where you get your energy from since delivery to the car is not going to have to change.

Could also solve the distribution problem

At the moment we burn huge amounts of fuel just moving our fuel around to different places.

Localized 'fuel farming' could greatly reduce this waste.

Re:Very large surface area needed

I was figuring a desert type environment, with salt water pumped in more or less straight to provide the water would be a lot cheaper than many other environments. Fresh water is getting expensive.

As for release into the wild, most likely not a big deal - conditions conductive to their growth isn't universal, areas conductive probably have non-altered species of cyanobacteria already that are more competitive.

Re:Very large surface area needed

From the Article:

"Brown and Nobles calculate that the approximate area needed to produce ethanol with corn to fuel all U.S. transportation needs is around 820,000 square miles, an area almost the size of the entire Midwest.
They hypothesize they could produce an equal amount of ethanol using an area half that size with the cyanobacteria based on current levels of productivity in the lab, but they caution that there is a lot of work ahead before cyanobacteria can provide such fuel in the field. Work with laboratory scale photobioreactors has shown the potential for a 17-fold increase in productivity. If this can be achieved in the field and on a large scale, only 3.5 percent of the area growing corn could be used for cyanobacterial biofuels."

By my math 3.5% of 820,000 is 28,700 sqaure miles. Which by most metrics is a lot of land, but not nearly what the karma whore was suggesting.

Re:Very large surface area needed

The best idea is probably to diversify our energy sources instead of relying on just one or the other.

Re:Very large surface area needed

Corn for just ethanol is a bad idea, but corn pressed to remove the oil for biodiesel,
sugar removed for fermentation to ethanol
the stover used for cellulose conversion,
and the high protein distiller's dried grain fed back to cattle for food production, not so bad.

Re:Very large surface area needed

The "parts like the stalk and leaves that typically got shredded up and left on the ground" get broken down by microbes thus returning nutrients to the soil. It's the decaying plant matter that makes soil soil instead of a bunch of microscopic rocks. If we start using the whole plant instead of just the ear, we're going to wind up turning the midwest into a giant dust bowl.

Re:Microbes are the cows of the future!

They will produce gas, meat and plastic in bio-reactors.

If you frequent McDonald's, you already produce gas, meat, and plastic in a bio-reactor, so this isn't new technology.

Re:Why, oh why..

Um.. to "dumb farmers" corn based ethanol IS a good idea. Higher demand drives up the price for their corn, making them more money.

Sounds like you are the dumb one for not realizing why farmers are pimping their corn for ethanol.

And no, I'm not saying corn based ethanol is a good idea, because it's not.. I'm just saying to farmers in the mid-west it's a good thing because they make more revenue. I guess the sad thing is there are a large number of "super farms" that are owned by New York businessmen.