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Published on 18 February 2009, 03:15
New “Biofuel Yeasts” for the Commercialisation of Cellulosic Ethanol
Bioethanol is considered a fuel of the future. It can be produced from plants, therefore providing a potentially cost-effective and renewable fuel. Its combustion is clean, and it yields only water and carbon dioxide, which the plants took from the atmosphere earlier. Current bioethanol production technologies can use only parts of plants, namely the storage sugars, such as glucose, sucrose or starch. These sugars are converted into ethanol in a fermentation process using yeasts, as in beer brewing or in distilleries. However, this technology is in competition with food and feed production.
“One of the major problems using other parts of plants, which today are considered as waste, is the inability of the yeasts to ferment some of the sugars of a large part of the plant material” says Eckhard Boles, professor at the Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany, and co-founder of the Swiss biofuel company Butalco GmbH. “Yeasts readily convert glucose, but leave xylose, or waste sugars, unused.” Now, Boles and his colleagues have succeeded in genetically modifying yeast, which enable the production of ethanol also from waste sugars.
Published in the journal Applied Environmental Microbiology: Dawid Brat, Eckhard Boles, and Beate Wiedemann; Functional expression of a bacterial xylose isomerase in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. published ahead of print on 13 February 2009, doi:10.1128/AEM.02522-08; http://aem.asm.org/papbyrecent.dtl.
By exploring the enormous amounts of information in current genetic databases they have discovered a new enzyme from a bacterial organism and inserted this enzyme into yeast cells taken from a commercial ethanol plant. “With just minor effort, we were able to teach the yeast cells how to ferment the waste sugar xylose into ethanol.” In contrast to current cellulosic ethanol technologies the new enzyme can convert xylose in only a single step and is not inhibited by other chemical compounds normally present within the yeast cells. “For the first time, we were able to demonstrate efficient xylose fermentation with a commercial yeast strain. This is a breakthrough in the commercialisation of cellulosic ethanol”.
Boles says: “We have successfully demonstrated the conversion of waste sugars into ethanol. However, ethanol is not the best renewable fuel alternative. There are other alcohols with much more promising properties.” Together with his company Butalco GmbH, Boles is now constructing yeast strains to convert plant waste materials into biobutanol which is being seen as a more superior alternative fuel than ethanol due to its more favourable chemical and physical properties.
Contact: Prof. Dr. Eckhard Boles, Institut für Molekulare Biowissenschaften,Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Max-von-Laue-Str. 9, D-60438 Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Phone: +49 (0)69 798 29513, Fax: +49 (0)69 798 29527, Email: e.boles@bio.uni-frankfurt.de
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