Engineered Stomach Microbe Converts Seaweed Into Ethanol

PolygamousRanchKid writes "Seaweed may well be an ideal plant to turn into biofuel. It grows in much of the two thirds of the planet that is underwater, so it wouldn't crowd out food crops the way corn for ethanol does. Because it draws its own nutrients and water from the sea, it requires no fertilizer or irrigation. Most importantly for would-be biofuel-makers, it contains no lignin—a strong strand of complex sugars that stiffens plant stalks and poses a big obstacle to turning land-based plants such as switchgrass into biofuel. 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 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."

Re:Nice from a tech point of view, *BUT*...

[TheRaven64]

No. The thing about a carbon cycle is that it's, uh, a cycle. If you take a plant and burn it, then grow another plant that absorbs the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, then you end up with no net increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. The problem is that we are mostly burning things like coal and oil that have not been atmospheric carbon for several million years. This is, in theory, the point of carbon offsets - they grow some new plants to absorb the carbon that you release from burning fossil fuels.

Cellulosic ethanol comes up short

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

The WSJ had an article last month on the Cellulosic Ethanol Debacle. [wsj.com] The various approaches just haven't worked at all. Try whatever tabletop approach catches your fancy but in the real world lignin just doesn't scale up to anything approaching meaningful commercial volumes, as of yet anyway. And our tax dollars go towards these attempts, keep in mind.

People have been fiddling about with these approaches for almost a century too, and making all manner of grandiose claims; I've parsed news clippings from the 1920s promising a coming era of limitless cheap ethanol to replace rock oil. It would take catastrophically high crude oil prices to really spur development here, but chances are we'd also turn to dirtier approaches like coal-to-liquids which are somewhat more profitable and scalable; or simply employ conservation to the point where the price would drop back down anyway. The International Energy Agency had an excellent document on approaches for
Saving Oil in a Hurry, which may be of interest.

Re:Is it the sweet crude oil?

[flyingfsck]

No. Oil is not decayed plant matter. Oil is created by archaea bacteria in the earth's crust, from methane and ethane gas that was created when the previous sun went nova. Note that I said 'is created' - an ongoing, but very, very slow process. Coal is decayed plant matter from multiple global wide tropical jungle periods about 100 million years ago.

Re:seawater into fuel?

[TheMeuge]

If they can keep this GMO sequestered in a watertight tank and remember that it could possibly destroy the ocean it would help the population of the world. It's sort of silly, however, that they spent all those resources creating this GMO when hemp is a very common and old source for ethanol. But nooo, we don't want to upset the fine folks at Dow, Goodyear, or Monsanto do we. Let's forget hemp and create a new organism.

The above illustrates the problem of informing the uninformed about scientific developments.

What reproductive and survival advantage does E Coli get from having these modifications done? Right... none. So while it'll happily digest the seaweed in a lab, or even in a manufacturing tank, if you dump it into the ocean it will a) die from incorrect environmental osmolality and pH b) be eaten by a variety of sea creatures.

Introducing rabbits to Australia was FAR worse than dumping TONS of this stuff into the ocean. This bacterium is so far from being able to "destroy the ocean" that it would take a colossal act of ignorance to claim it as such. Oh wait...

Re:i doubt that seaweed

[drinkypoo]

You can't compare the edible seaweed in the market with seaweed for ethanol production. It's probably a completely different plant.

Probably? So you don't actually know anything relevant, but you decided to gift and delight us with your comment anyway? Too bad you didn't read the fine summary: "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." HTH, next time think for more than a tenth of a second before clicking submit.