May 12th, 2008

By John DeFore

With the chorus of ethanol critics becoming impossible to ignore, biofuel advocates are under pressure to pursue options that don’t threaten the world’s food supplies. Researchers at the University of Texas announced late last month that they’ve developed a promising contender: a new microbe that produces a form of cellulose which is particularly well suited to creating both ethanol and what the researchers describe as “designer fuels.”

An article published in the scientific journal Cellulose describes how doctors R. Malcolm Brown and David Nobles created the new cyanobacteria by introducing genes from a different variety of bacterium known for its cellulose production. The resulting organism produces cellulose in a more useful form — allowing producers to harvest glucose, cellulose and sucrose without harming the cyanobacteria.

As Dr. Nobles put it in a statement, “the huge expense in making cellulosic ethanol and biofuels is in using enzymes and mechanical methods to break cellulose down. Using the cyanobacteria escapes these expensive processes.” In addition, this bacteria can be grown using salt water, thus having no impact on drinkable water supplies.

The team’s hope is that this bacteria could eventually produce levels of ethanol equivalent to that made with corn while using only 3.5 percent of the area corn requires — though they admit that this hypothetical result depends on making substantial lab progress. At their current levels of productivity, the cyanobacteria would require half the land corn crops use — and that’s assuming real-world production could replicate results achieved in a controlled laboratory.

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