Bacteria Transformed into Biofuel Refineries: Scientific American
source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=bacteria-transformed-into-biofuel-refineries
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- BUILDUSMAXIMUS
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The idea in this case is to produce a batch of biofuel from a single colony through E. coli's natural ability to proliferate and, after producing the fuel, dispose of the E. coli and start anew with a fresh colony, according to Keasling. "This minimizes the mutations that might arise if one continually subcultured the microbe," he says. The idea is also to engineer the new organism, deleting key metabolic pathways, such that it would never survive in the wild in order to prevent escapes with unintended environmental impacts, among other dangers.
But ranging outside of its natural processes, E. coli is not the most efficient producer of biofuel. "We are at about 10 percent of the theoretical maximum yield from sugar," Keasling notes. "We would like to be at 80 to 90 percent to make this commercially viable. Furthermore, we would need a large-scale production process," such as 100,000 liter tanks to allow mass production of microbial fuel.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=bacteria-transformed-into-biofu...
But ranging outside of its natural processes, E. coli is not the most efficient producer of biofuel. "We are at about 10 percent of the theoretical maximum yield from sugar," Keasling notes. "We would like to be at 80 to 90 percent to make this commercially viable. Furthermore, we would need a large-scale production process," such as 100,000 liter tanks to allow mass production of microbial fuel.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=bacteria-transformed-into-biofu...
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- groups:
- Green
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- tags:
- Energy, Biofuels, Refinery, enrgy crisis
