Termite guts spilled - November 22, 2007
The future of biofuels may lie in fast-growing woody plants, which theoretically could provide a more environmentally friendly and efficient source of fuel than things like corn. But breaking the cellulose in such plants into compounds usable for fuels is tricky. Scientists have long sought to learn a lesson from termites on how best to digest these woody bits. Now scientists in Nature report a metagenomic analysis of the bugs that live in the guts of 150 termites guts from a Costa Rican rainforest, producing a catalogue of about 1,000 bacterial enzymes that could be useful for future biofuel efforts.
There’s big potential here: a termite's intestines can theoretically turn one sheet of paper into two litres of hydrogen, Andreas Brune of the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, Germany, told the press (eg Reuters). But it’s a way off yet. Cataloguing the enzymes of interest is just the first step.
Nature has written about this specific Costa Rican project before, in a feature about biodiversity mining. And we have a good collection of news features on the future of biofuels.