Scientists develop microbe that produces fuels directly from biomass

Washington, January 28 (ANI): A team of scientists from the US Department of Energy's Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) has developed a microbe that can produce an advanced biofuel directly from biomass.

Deploying the tools of synthetic biology, the JBEI researchers engineered a strain of Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria to produce biodiesel fuel and other important chemicals derived from fatty acids.

"The fact that our microbes can produce a diesel fuel directly from biomass with no additional chemical modifications is exciting and important," said Jay Keasling, the Chief Executive Officer for JBEI, and a leading scientific authority on synthetic biology.

"Given that the costs of recovering biodiesel are nowhere near the costs required to distill ethanol, we believe our results can significantly contribute to the ultimate goal of producing scalable and cost effective advanced biofuels and renewable chemicals," he added.

Keasling led the collaboration, which was was made up of a team from JBEI's Fuels Synthesis Division that included Eric Steen, Yisheng Kang and Gregory Bokinsky, and a team from LS9, a privately-held industrial biotechnology firm based in South San Francisco.

E. coli is a well-studied microorganism whose natural ability to synthesize fatty acids and exceptional amenability to genetic manipulation make it an ideal target for biofuels research.

The combination of E. coli with new biochemical reactions realized through synthetic biology, enabled Keasling, Steen and their colleagues to produce structurally tailored fatty esters (biodiesel), alcohols and waxes directly from simple sugars.

"Biosynthesis of microbial fatty acids produces fatty acids bound to a carrier protein, the accumulation of which inhibits the making of additional fatty acids," Steen said.

"Normally E. coli doesn't waste energy making excess fat, but by cleaving fatty acids from their carrier proteins, we're able to unlock the natural regulation and make an abundance of fatty acids that can be converted into a number of valuable products," he added.

"Further, we engineered our E. coli to no longer eat fatty acids or use them for energy," he further added.

After successfully diverting fatty acid metabolism toward the production of fuels and other chemicals from glucose, the JBEI researchers engineered their new strain of E. coli to produce hemicellulases - enzymes that are able to ferment hemicellulose, the complex sugars that are a major constituent of cellulosic biomass and a prime repository for the energy locked within plant cell walls. (ANI)