Scientists Use Gut Bacteria to Turn Seaweed Into Biofuel

Here are a few reasons, at least according to Scientific American, why seaweed could make the perfect biofuel: it doesn't need fertilizer or irrigation and it doesn't have a component found in land plants that has proven difficult to deal with for biofuel engineers.

Recently, researchers at the Bio Architecture Lab, Inc., (BAL) and the University of Washington in Seattle have also found that an extremely common bacteria can be used to help exploit this plant's properties to make fuel. Scientific American reports that the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has stated that the U.S. could get 1 percent of its fuel from a little less than 1 percent of seaweed harvested from the country's coastal territories.

Researchers at BAL and the University of Washington made genetic modifications to E. Coli that allowed it to turn the sugars of the seaweed into fuel. Scientific American has more:

To get his E. coli to digest kombu [(a type of seaweed)], Yoshikuni turned to nature—specifically, he looked into the genetics of natural microbes that can break down alginate, the predominant sugar molecule in the brown seaweed. "The form of the sugar inside the seaweed is very exotic," [co-founder of BAL Yasuo] Yoshikuni told Scientific American. "There is no industrial microbe to break down alginate and convert it into fuels and chemical compounds."

In a test, the researchers mixed the kombu with water and the genetically altered E. Coli and found after two days the mixture was 5 percent ethanol. Scientific American reports Yoshikuni as saying that the E.Coli could potentially be modified to digest other plant sugars for making ethanol and other non-fuel materials.

[H/T Venture Beat]