Vodka is not made of sawdust
Alcohol from algae instead of oil
Biofuel – ethanol – can be efficiently obtained from brown algaeGrigory Kolpakov, "Newspaper.
Ru»A bacterium has been created that can efficiently process brown algae into biofuel – ethanol.
Some scientists have already called the corresponding work an "engineering feat", but for the effective use of this technology it is necessary to produce a million times more brown algae than today.
The production of biofuels from seaweed using specially created bacteria is a relatively new trend, which scientists began to seriously think about only a few years ago. Biofuels from the sea are much more attractive than those produced from sugar cane or maize – you don't have to sacrifice for this either arable land (and on a huge scale), water for irrigation, or food supplies, that is, everything that is already lacking in the world today. The main problem here was the extraction of fuel from marine biomass – the creation of a bacterium capable of efficiently extracting sugars from it and decomposing them into alcohol. After several years of active research in many laboratories around the world, this problem has finally been solved. As a diet for this bacterium, a group of researchers from the private company Bio Architecture Lab, Inc., located in Berkeley, USA, chose brown algae.
According to Yatsuo Yoshikuni, the main author of the article in Science (Wargacki et al., An Engineered Microbial Platform for Direct Biofuel Production from Brown Macroalgae), they are available, produced on an industrial scale, grow in large quantities and much faster than, say, red or green algae – so, giant kelp (sea cabbage), which lives off the coast of California, grows a whole meter in a day.
The main discovery that allowed scientists to create the right bacterium was that they were able to isolate a small portion of DNA responsible for metabolism from the bacterium Vibrio splendidus, which feeds on brown algae, but naturally does not produce any alcohols. This fragment allows you to decompose one of the main carbohydrates contained in brown algae – alginate – into simple sugars. Scientists inserted this site into the genome of the bacterium Escherichia coli – the most important experimental microbe for all geneticists in the world, and for this operation a strain of the bacterium was selected, genetically modified in such a way that it could convert simple sugars into ethanol. In addition to its remarkable laboratory qualities, E. coli can, in theory, be genetically engineered to produce many types of fuels and other useful chemical compounds.
The bacterium turned out to be successful. As researchers from Bio Architecture Lab, Inc. write in the article, it processes up to 80% of all alginate, which theoretically can be extracted from algae, into alcohol.
Colleagues of the researchers highly appreciate this work, one of them even called it an "engineering feat". However, there is still room for some skepticism.
Brown algae is a good substitute for oil and gas fields. It is estimated that from three percent of the coastal waters of the planet, an amount of fuel equivalent to more than 250 billion liters of fossil fuels can be obtained annually. People have been growing brown algae for more than a hundred years, in many maritime countries today their production is put on a commercial basis. However, only a few thousand tons of these algae are produced per year, whereas billions of tons are needed for biofuel energy. And no one knows how to do it yet.
Yoshikumi, however, is optimistic. He says that this year his team will demonstrate the biofuel capabilities of its bacteria at a pilot plant that is currently being built in Chile.
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20.01.2012