Mass sequencing effort tackles termite guts
Bacteria could be put to use to make environmentally friendly fuels.
A facility built to do some of the heavy-duty processing for the human genome initiative is now cracking into the genomes of microorganisms; not as individuals, but en masse.
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Comments
As far as environmental applications go, and ethanol production from biomass in particular, there is no lack of promising enzyme candidates to be found in nature. By studying various organisms from termite gut symbionts to wood degrading fungi, an abundance of cellulases, amylases and the like have been discovered and characterized, with the hopes of finding or creating a "superzyme" perfectly adapted for biofuel production. So far, success has been somewhat elusive, and the 10 to 100-fold improvement in enzymatic performance needed to make large-scale ethanol production from biomass cheaper than petroleum is still a ways off. Bioprospecting will help but it is only the tip of the iceberg, and it will take many integrated efforts, such as the Iogen/Shell facility, before the objective is reached.
Posted by: Vincent Dodelet | February 21, 2006 02:33 PM
Could termite guts hold the key to the world's energy problems? Don't laugh.
Here are a few numbers to keep in mind regarding the future of hydrogen-powered cars:
Tailpipe emissions: zero.
Dependency on foreign oil: zero.
Number of termites crawling the planet: One hundred quadrillion. That's a one followed by seventeen zeros.
Granted, not many people are hip to the termite part of the equation yet. And most of those who are can be found in Walnut Creek working at the Joint Genome Institute, a branch of the federal Department of Energy that is looking for alternative fuel sources in some very unexpected places -- like a termite's gut.
http://racemotion.org
Posted by: Justin Cooper | December 12, 2006 03:12 PM