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grayton downing

Biofuel Mimicry | The Scientist Magazine® - 0 views

www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/37587/title/Biofuel-Mimicry/

biofuel scientist mimicry research

shared by grayton downing on 29 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • ants create the largest colonies of any ant, with some comprising 8 million individuals. To sustain themselves, they march across the forest carrying vast quantities of leaves, piece by piece, in great green convoys, back to the nest. The ants use the leaves as fertilizer to cultivate gardens sown with bacteria and Leucoagaricus gongylophorous, a fungus that produces fruiting bodies packed with nutrients for the ants to feast on.
  • could also provide a model for the more efficient production of renewable biofuels.
  • confirmed that 145 lignocellulases were actually present. “That’s pretty definitive proof that the fungus is the primary driver of biomass breakdown,
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  • offers new insights into the contributions made by the fungus to plant degradation
  • identification of enzymes capable of degrading lignocelluloses could also be a boon for the biofuels industry. Biofuel companies already use enzyme blends to break down starches from plant biomass, most commonly corn, into sugars to be fermented into ethanol. But the enzymes currently available can’t break down tough-to-degrade molecules such as lignocelluloses on an industrial scale.
  • idea is that the genes coding for these enzymes in the fungus gardens of leafcutter ants can be mass-produced in the lab by inserting them into E. coli or yeast, then used to break down feedstocks that require less land, fewer resources, and that don’t compete with food crops. “This is a highly evolved system, so the hypothesis is that the enzymes would be highly tuned to break down plant biomass,”
  • researchers will also need to take into account the role of bacteria. “It could be that bacteria are producing some enzymes that enhance the efficacy of the fungal enzymes,” says Aylward. “Integrating the bacterial component is likely to be important, because the synergism we see with leafcutter gardens is on the level of the entire symbiosis.”
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