SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
Seaweed Study Fuels Bioenergy Enthusiasm
from Science News
Seaweed has long made biofuel prospectors drool, but they hadn't figured out how to efficiently chew through the stuff--until now. Researchers have engineered a bacterium that can break down and digest seaweed's gummy cell walls to yield ethanol and other useful compounds. If scientists can make the process work at larger scales, seaweed could soon be a serious contender as a source of renewable fuel.
The new research "makes a pretty large leap forward," says metabolic engineer Hal Alper of the University of Texas at Austin. Unlike corn and many other biofuel feedstocks, seaweed doesn't need arable land, fertilizer or freshwater. If seaweed can be efficiently munched into ethanol, it broadens the biofuel horizon, says Alper, who was not involved in the research. Seaweed, he says, may be "that new source for unconventional carbon that everyone's been looking for."
Scientists from Bio Architecture Lab, a biofuel and renewable chemicals company headquartered in Berkeley, Calif., were interested in creating a biofuel bacterium that is a one-stop shop: They wanted a microbe that could efficiently digest the seaweed cellular building block alginate without pretreatment with chemicals or heat. Alginate is commonly used in ice creams and some textiles, but has proved difficult to break down and metabolize into fuel.
Read more...
Science in the Media
Newspapers:
Magazines and Web Sites:
The Science-Media Intersection:
Subscribe to Our Content!
Visit our RSS Feeds page to choose among 13 customized feeds, or create a free My AmSci account to request an email notice whenever a specified author, department or discipline appears online.