Slashdot Mirror
Rainforest Fungus Synthesizes Diesel
Fluffeh alerts us to a report of a fungus that naturally produces diesel fuel, or something very close to it. "A fungus that lives inside trees in the Patagonian rain forest naturally makes a mix of hydrocarbons that bears a striking resemblance to diesel, biologists announced today. And the fungus can grow on cellulose, a major component of tree trunks, blades of grass and stalks that is the most abundant carbon-based plant material on Earth. ... [T]the paper's authors admit that the technique is far from any sort of industrial production. 'This report presents no information on the cost-effectiveness or other details to make G. roseum an alternative fuel source,' they write." NPR has an interview with the fungus's discoverer.
Most Slashdotters' faces produce copious amounts of oil.
I think it would be really poetic if the first use of this fungus is to digest the entire Patagonian rain forest into sweet, greasy diesel.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
if you ask me. I hope we are smart and research more ways to provide energy, and don't just hop on another band wagon technology.
What's the difference between G. Roseum and an oil baron?
One is a parasitic inhuman slime capable of producing copius amounts of fuel, and the other is a mushroom.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
When we looked at the gas analysis, I was flabbergasted," said Gary Strobel, a plant scientist at Montana State University
So it's not producing diesel, but some fuel called "Flabbergas"
AT&ROFLMAO
2. put them in a plant that expresses the diesel in an easily harvested format
3. profit. MAJOR profit. and just financial profit
a. geopolitical: you don't fund wahabbi islam via saudi arabia, blowhards in venezuela, or neoimperialism in russia.
b. environmental: you don't add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, you simply recycle it.
c. economic: a stable agricultral source of fuel is a lot better for a healthy economy than undependable one you need to mine
please, someone, go win your nobel prize for chemistry, biology, AND peace, and isolate those genes. and then someone else: make your first trillion, turn this genetically engineered plant into a major company
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
people were whining about 1/3 of the amphibian population possibly going extinct in the near future and why should they care? I'm sure these same people adhere to the adage, as promulgated by Rush Limbaugh, of cutting down all the trees to make way for development.
This, among many others, is a classic example of why we need to keep the rainforests around for as long as possible. Who knows what other goodies are lying in wait for some curious scientist to find?
If people think that clear-cutting forests and losing what lies within is a good thing, go to Manhattan to see why this is not a trend that should be continued*.
* I visit Manhattan twice a year and love wandering about its concrete canyons but it's a showcase for what happens when there is no open space (as are other big cities).
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
What, 20 replies now, and not a single variation on "There is a real energy crisis, we have to focus on fixing it! Oil doesn't grow on trees! Wait, what now? Oh. ..."
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
Mr. Diesel designed his engine so that farmers could make their own fuel back in the day when there weren't filling stations in rural areas. It could still be done from farm crops, garbage, this new fungus, all sorts of things. What we need is government approval of the efficient turbo-diesel engines that they use in Europe, and then plants to make the stuff in numerous ways depending on what is most economical in a given region.
Please mod parent UP!
The basic premise of the parent post, sucking the right genes out of the fungus and splicing them into something a little more productive, is right in the frickin' article and bears repeating:
Troll my ass...
Switch grass is not a crop you can eat, and it would ideally be grown on marginal land.
Waste paper could also be used, do you eat a lot of that?
Yeah, because we eat a lot of tree trunks, blades of grass, and stalks. Plus we eat things like scrub weeds that can grow in the harshest of conditions with no irrigation or pesticides.
Or we could convert them into biodiesel.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
and therefore has all the disadvantages (removing crops from possible consumption) to the supply of food that our current techniques have.
Really? When's the last time you ate algae? Or wood chips?
There are options that don't require cutting into the food chain. I'm not sure why so many people assume biofuels == food shortage.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
Just one step closer to Douglas Adams' statement that, in such a large Universe, most things one could possibly imagine (and a lot one would rather not), grow somewhere.
Good, cause when someone throws a lit match in my yard, I would love for it all to go up in smoke first, and continue on to the remaining neighborhoods.
Disclaimer: I am not god.
We may not be created equal
But we can be treated equal.
So how long until people start screaming once more "oh no they're cutting down the rainforest" ? Massive quantities of cellulose there. If oil, sorry, WHEN oil does go through every roof and such a technology is available, the rainforest will be cut down entirely. Not that Brazil isn't cutting it down already.
And the realists will, correctly, point out that once again someone felt like reporting an extermely long shot. Yes this "might work", but it "might work" as in "it's possible that a rotating superconductor creates antigravity". There are interesting experiments, proof of concepts, and it "just might work". But really it's not news at all.
A VERY long shot.
RTFA This fungus digests cellulose. You don't. It might drive up the cost of paper, but it wouldn't compete for foods usable by humans.
The disadvantages only exist because of net energy inefficiencies. Creating a bio-diesel that can have positive net energy production negates the extraction of food products from the world food supply through indoor growing mechanisms.
Hope it doesn't stink like biodiesel.
The Humvee driving Republicans want to save the rainforest now, but unfortunately their heads asplode.
include $sig;
1;
yet I won't hold my breath. In the mean time, I will continue to burn B20 and SVO in my old diesel.
In addition to brewing diesel from cellulose, I would also like to see biofuels manufacturers brew butanol (with Clostridium acetobutylicum, or better) from cellulose. Seriously, it is a much better gasoline replacement than E85. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butanol
In any case, foodstock based ethanol is the WORST FUEL SUBSTITUTE EVAR. http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0512/p08s01-comv.html
If the chevy volt doesn't turn out to be a piece of shit, (yeah, good luck with that. Can GM manage NOT to make a piece of shit?) I would totally buy that for my daily commute and keep the diesel for my occasional interstate forays. Or maybe the Th!nk OX http://blogs.cars.com/kickingtires/2008/03/think-ox-concep.html will be available in the US by then. Or maybe Toyota will get its head out of its ass and realize that not everyone thinks a hybrid is the future, and they will out-chevy-volt the chevy volt.
While I am enumerating my wish list, a 10 minute recharge battery, and start the infrastructure build-out by creating charging stations at toll-way rest areas, then add them to interstate rest areas (which tend to be 50 miles apart on most of the interstates I've traveled.) http://www.onelectriccars.com/lightning-gt-promises-10-minute-recharge/74/
That will "untether" electric cars, and is feasible with current battery technology. Then fueling stations can invest in charging devices if enough people have EVs in their area
http://www.afdc.energy.gov/afdc/fuels/electricity_locations.html
heh. I'm just rambling now...
More music, fewer hits
Is a way to trap all the methane I produce when I have milk with my Mexican food.
Anytime someone asks me what the point of protecting biodiversity/the rainforest/the environment I will point to this article. There are many other reasons IMO, but "tree hugger" is a derogatory term these days.
1 - There is already something similar to this. I don't know the details, because I only heard about it quickly in the radio here in Brazil. Some US or Canadian company already has something similar ready, but for sugarcane instead of wood. They had development fase close to completion, starting planning for eventual production.
2 - Rain Forest? In Patagonia????? Sorry if my english sucks, but as far as I know, Rain Forest is a tropical forest. Patagonia is in the southern extreme of South America. That's temperate to polar Climate!!!!!
Potential problem? Most fungi breathe oxygen, and expel carbon dioxide. I don't think this will be all that beneficial if industrialized on a large scale unless this is one of the rare types of fungi that breathes carbon dioxide. We'll solve the problem with renewable energy while exacerbating the greenhouse gas problem. Greenhouse gases will be produced in the production AND consumption of the fuel.
I think this makes a really good case for the value of bio-diversity, and why slashing and burning rainforests is bad for even non-aesthetic reasons.
If the entire Patagonian rain forest had been converted to crop land and then (a few seasons later) dessert, we may have never discovered a fungus like this, on account of it no longer existing.
DNRTFA: Do Not Resuscitate The Fine Article?
A modest proposal in so many cases...
--Coming up with something clever... please wait...
Rain Forest perishes in tragic car accident/heart attack/stroke/garage fire.
find out if anything feeds off of it and you can clean oil spills up?
Too bad it doesn't run on cellulite, that would solve America's energy problems for millenia.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
How is this different from the Weizmann Organism?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiezmann_organism
Dave
Quick, everybody go to the rainforest and cut everything down and collect this fungus quickly before it's all gone! ~
"I don't have to think. I only have to do it. The results are always perfect, but that's old news." - Meat Puppets
Except that Patagonia does not belong to Brazil, but rather to Argentina and Chile.
But I understand your mistake, since "rain forest" usually equates to the Amazon basin. I have never hear the term "Patagonian Rain Forest" before. Maybe there is something fishy with this summary?
Quick! Kill it with fire!
Technoli
You can also see a very interesting discussion on fungi in general on the ted talks from virgin america. www dot ted dot com. Very interesting stuff...
If that's such a good idea, why don't YOU do it?
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
Hopefully this is for real and not oil company electioneering: "casts some doubt on the idea that crude oil is a fossil fuel" If its true this would be great: we don't have to run out in 10-20-50-100-1000 years. And I can grow it my backyard! Yeah!
I used to be your average Joe Sixpack. After 8 years of Bush, I'm now your average Joe 40-oz.
This seems funny at first, because comparing one 12 oz beer of a sixpack to a 40 oz of malt liquor yields more drinking. But, a sixpack of 12 oz beers is really 72 oz. So now I'm confused. Do you actually drink less beer now than you used to?
Mortierella spp such as M. isabellina will also produce oils. The issue is the biological efficiency and robustness of the bug.
We have many cellulose digesters and and indeed many very robust fungus which can handle the lignans and pentosans found in many agricultural wastes. So there is a very good chance we can biologically turn these wastes into liquid fuels. However we can also use destructive pyrolysis and this is a well known very rapid and robust technique which will not require very stringent pharmaceutical level biological controls in order to be successful.
Further more as stated at the outset, the biological efficiency has to be considered.
The next issue is how much oil we can expect to produce from fermentation processes. The answer is not nearly enough. The world uses about 86 million barrels of crude oil per day. The USA as an example uses in the vicinity of about 22 million barrels of oil per day. If the USA were to convert 100% of their corn crop into ethanol (which is a very dumb thing to do) then they would produce enough liquid fuels to run their auto fleet for about 2 weeks. IE... its a drop in the bucket.
Note that the ethanol production converts the starches. Once can look at the rest of the plant as well of course.
We still don't have enough biomass but it will help.
What we can also look at is a combined fermentation / photosynthesis process where we use the fermentation to break down organic matter and meanwhile use algae for instance in an attached green house environment to capture sunlight. The fermentation process produces massive amounts of CO2. The photosynthesis will convert this CO2 back into biomass. We have a perfect system it would seem. In fact there are species of algae which will produce 45% oil by dry weight and species of fungus which will ferment the waste biomass from the pressed algae and also produce 45% oil on a dry weight basis.
The issue with this idea is the cost per square meter. The maximum solar constant in space is 1300 watts per square meter. The maximum we get on planet earth is about 1000 watts per square meter. The average we can expect over the planet is under 200 watts per square meter... but we don't need to worry about the majority of the planet which is below average.
If we assume a kilowatt hour of electricity is worth 10 cents then if we assume we can get say 500 watts of power per square meter then the maximum return works out to be about 5 cents per square meter per hour. We can assume a maximum of say 12 hours so that is $0.60 per square meter per day maximum return if everything runs at 100%
Of course we have to multiply this by some fudge factor which represents attainable efficiency.
Most likely in the near term we would be lucky to get say 10%. Give or take we can expect to get about 5 cents per square meter per day.
If it costs $50 bux to fill up the car then one would need about 1000 square meters of collector area to get things in the right ball park. I'm not saying this is not doable. I'm just saying that it will be bloody expensive to do. Furthermore a collector like this will not fit on the average city lot.
Don't you see, this is natures version of grey goo. Who needs nano-machines when you can have a fungus do it for you... It's a bad idea; a really bad idea.
....Just look under the hood of one of DoD's tactical military vehicles. You'll find a turbocharged, multi-fuel Diesel, capable of burning anything from LH to bear grease.
Regards;
Who needs fungus. Bodies burn just fine.
Soylent Green is PEOPLE!!!
I couldn't resist.
Better check out the EROEI Energy returned on energy invested.
Seems to be a well known fact that each food calorie requires 10 calories worth of oil/natgas for transportation, heavy farm machinery, fertilizers, pesticides, etc.
It's unlikely this fungus converts much above 50% efficiency. After a few centuries of careful genetic engineering we can get some alcohol yeasts up to around 20%, so even 50% is kind of optimistic for this fungus.
Also it probably requires some processing, lets say again at 50% efficiency? Of course the only industrial processes I know that run that high are exotic binary cycle steam power plants. I would think 50% is optimistic for processing this fungus.
So, maybe, this is a way to turn 40 barrels of crude oil into 1 barrel of biodiesel? Why not burn the other 39 barrels directly instead of wasting them making one barrel of biodiesel?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Well I'm lichen your idea... Technically a lichen has a fungus and something that photosynthesizes, usually algae or cyanobacterium (or sometimes both). And the nutrients that get passed back and forth usually aren't cellulose, but maybe it'd be possible to get that kind of fungus together with a plant.
Alternatively, you could combine the fungus's cellulose-to-diesel features with growing cellulose-stalked grains, so instead of using corn to produce ethanol competing with using corn for food, you'd grow the corn, keep the seeds for food, and feed the stalks and cobs to the fungus for fuel.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
and algae is the most abundant carbon-based vegetation, not trees and grass.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
Yet Another reason for us to tear down the rainforests
*Chains himself to a Tree* lol
Stupidity only gets you so far, then you've gotta try
He'll bankrupt them before they can get it production. Save the planet!
To all those MSX and Metal Gear fans, do you remember OILIX, the Zanzibar-native-fuel-producing microorganism from Metal Gear || - Solid Snake?
fungus turning almost anything into a snake oil.
for small values of universe and large values of sahara
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Well, yes, this sounds exciting, but it is not new. Look up US patent 4,698,304, Method for producing hydrocarbon mixtures, applied for in 1985, granted in 1987. Fukada specifically patents using this fungus (and others) to produce the C2-C5 molecules that seem so important today. Maybe they have improved production rate, or efficiency. k2
about a million years, and yes, the fungus turns into crude oil. No wonder they are nowhere near production levels.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
This has potential to help with oil/energy crisis, but it won't help with global warming.
To oversimplify, we're simply burning too much and creating too much exhaust. More diesel doesn't help solve that.
If we keep increasing our energy production/use, we're gonna need a giant heat sink for this planet.
...there's probably a lot of diesel under the Patagonian rain forests.
Soylent diesel is made of people!
As Bio-diesel it has all the problems of cellulose derived ethanol, meaning trees, switchgrass, corn stalks, but not necessarily food crops.
The forests aren't in direct competition to food crops, until the prices for biomass feed stocks are high enough for someone to plow under his corn, soy, and other food crops to grow trees, or switchgrass.
If the corn farmer sells his corn stalks for biomass, then he's depleting his land faster than if he composted them, but he's probably already selling those for livestock feed anyways.
As with all bio-fuels, it has the additional problems of depleting drinking water available to humans and livestock. It possibly also creates fertilizer runoff to pollute yet more water.
I don't see this raising food crop prices as much, as say secondary markets like, livestock feed. There will be a corresponding rise in meat, dairy and poultry costs.
Actually, there is a company making biodiesel by using strands of algae. They do basically the same thing as this fungus but they claim their algae uses only 10% of their food to live. The rest gets turned into oil. Their algae also makes oil with a similar flavor to olive oil. Talk about efficient, feeding the world and fueling our cars.
I'm chewing on a toothpick right now, you insensitive clod!
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
your liver produces glucose from glycogen stores that your muscles can burn. your body has an entire organ system, your adipose tissue, whose sole purpose is to produce a partly oxidized hydrocarbon (your fat) to store energy that is later consumed in times of food scarcity
going further, there are plants that manufacture oils that are then later consumed by the plant's offspring: its called a seed
this is not a radical or broken concept on my part, the production of something that the creature consumes itself
of course, a plant that produces cellulose support tissue that is degraded by its own cells is a horrible mutant that wouldn't make it 6 days in the wild and would look like a stunted deformed pile of oozing plant diesel pus. who cares? if it makes diesel. in fact, all of the major food crops we produce in this world are horribly bloated mutants that can't even reproduce on their own, nevermind survive in the wild. so creating an abomination which digests itself is not really that odd when considering the abominations we have produced without even the benefit of genetic engineering throughout the history of human agriculture
furthermore, your pointing to want to put it in a bacterial vat for degradation is completely missing the point of the excitement over this find: the point is to have LESS steps in your product of biodiesel. we can already put raw cellulose in bioreactors and produce new and exciting chemicals via bioengineered bacteria. that's not exiciting. its also extra effort and more steps in the production pipeline that wastes energy. if you could simply put one damn genetically engineered plant into the sun, and the damn thing weeps diesel, you have something clearly superior to the bioreactor model you have to feed with cellulose you need to chop up and masticate: energy expenses
so in modding me troll you compound your lack of imagination and lack of basic biology education with a lack of getting the whole damn point of the excitement over this find
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Rain Forest, Pine Forest, etc... they are types of Forests...
!sig
There are options that don't require cutting into the food chain. I'm not sure why so many people assume biofuels == food shortage.
Because for some reason this country seems to have decided that biofuels == corn.
On top of that, don't we still have farmers paid to NOT grow crops? To keep the prices up? Get rid of that, let them grow crops for fuel.
What new in that? We already can produce diesel and alcohol at same way using some kind of bacteria's. Its just new that a SPECIFIC KIND OF FUNGUS do IT. But the problem still. FROM CELLULOSE that mean, TREES. Actually, we can produce Alcohol from "Cana de Aucar" or "Mandioca" or biodisel from almost any Leguminous Plant, cheap and in a more efficient way. ( who use corn or soja do produce alchool is dum. because its the worst rendition today. just subsided country do it, and to proof that IS GOOD A LOT). The problem is The how much trees we need to get back to produce one lither of diesel? Like the Bacteria we have today. If we use this can be worst than use coal. One problem no one speak to, is the WATER. How much WATER we need to produce the plant/tree to get one lither of diesel/alcohol?
a plant that can't reproduce has benefits, not detractions. it is not a mistake that the majority of our food crops in this world can't reproduce on their own. they are completely dependent upon man to reproduce: mankind controls their spread, allowing for efficient management of agriculture, rather than fighting constant wars of reclamation against the crop you planted last year, or spreading uncontrolled across the countryside
furthermore, you could have the plant's diesel production pathway exist only in certain parts of the plant, or expressed only at certain times during the year. attaching the diesel making genes to genes that express only in certain parts of the plant, or express only at certain times of the year
for example: you could have a plant that constantly weeps diesel at the tips of stalks where the specific gene is expressed as cellulose cells keep growing into the region, so you get manageable predefined rivulets falling conveniently into specific collection points. imagine a mat under a tree collecting run off. or, program all of the plant's cells express the gene in october. so you let the plants grow for six months, and during that time it expresses no diesel whatsover. then october comes, the gene that many plants possess to stay attuned to the seasons gets triggered, and all of the plants spontaneously decompose on their own into a pool of plant diesel slime at the same time. then mop it all up
or forget all of this, and go with what nature gave us: a fungus that makes diesel inside trees. naturally amp up the production of diesel via genetically engineering, or tried and true horticultural methods that we have used to have giant apples and corn ears, and collect the diesel like we collect maple syrup: stick a tap in and let it drain off. you could have orchards of trees, where instead of dates or pears, you get diesel leaking into buckets
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Just great, I am now imaging people driving around with their neighbor's arm or leg stick out of the gas tank. If the police pull them over they just say their commuting and that they LIKE to sit in the back of the car...
The proper way to do it is to skip the whole cellulose bit. Go straight from sunlight, water, and carbon to cetane. Or iso-octane. Or whatever. Though, I don't think that is what this article is about.
-
attaching the expression of genes to only certain parts of an animal or under certain times/ environmental changes is old hat. the guys who won the nobel prize this year for chemistry discovered how to manipulate the expression of green fluorescent protein:
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2008/index.html
why is this a big deal? because after their discovery, thousands of genetic researchers around the globe have attached that gene to specific biological pathways, to see how and when and where and why the pathway is expressed, simply by watching an organism fluoresce. for example, neuroscientists wondering at the genes for axon growth and formation will attach the gfp protein code to a certain gene he suspects of involvement, and confirm that gene's involvement in axon growth by seeing green fluoresence whenever an axon grows
in fact, it would be HARDER to have a gene expressed globally, all over an organism, then it would be to attach the gene expression to only certian areas, or certain times, or under certain environmental changes
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
My MPV has been running on 90% sunflower oil for most of the summer.
What the heck are you guys smoking?
Oh yeah, fungus.
Depending on how the fungus in question lives and grows, it could be more useful to see if the fungus could be encouraged to grow (or at least metabolize) anaerobically. If the diesel-producing fungus can do this trick anaerobically, then the chances of being able to do this under water could be good.
The application of this should be apparent - underwater diesel production would allow us to utilize this fungus in large vats, feeding waste material into the vats and then pulling the diesel from the rest of the solution as we go.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
don't we still have farmers paid to NOT grow crops?
Yes, we do.
To keep the prices up?
That is not the only reason why we do that.
Allowing certain fields to lie fallow for a season is responsible farming. The most common application of farmers being paid to not grow crops (that I am aware of) involves farmers who are asked to leave some fraction (say 1/4 or so) of their total farming land fallow each season. They are still growing crops, just not as much as they would if they farmed all their land that year.
However, this is actually a responsible technique from the long-term perspective because of the impact that farming has on the land. If a farmer leaves 1/4 un-farmed each year, then that means their land undergoes 3 year on, 1 year off cycles of fertilizer, pesiticide, irrigation, tilling, etc.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I can't wait for what they come up with for the logo to use on the back of cars!
Exactly. What with all that carbon algae, the rainforrests must have a gigantic carbon footprint. The potential for that carbon to enter the world's ecosystem is just too much. If we want to save the environment, we must cut the rainforrests down and shoot the trees and plants into space. It's the only way to be sure.
The Internet is generally stupid
attaching the expression of genes to only certain parts of an animal or under certain times/ environmental changes is old hat. the guys who won the nobel prize this year for chemistry discovered how to manipulate the expression of green fluorescent protein:
Not the same thing as what you're talking about by a long shot. Shimomura got it for discovering the existence of the protein, not expression. Tsien won the award for greatly advancing our understanding of the mollecule and improving it's signal strength, not expression.
Chalfie I believe won it for his pioneering technique of using GFP expression to study expression systems. You put the code for GFP under a sequence you think is a promoter, the cells that are lit up are cells that use that promoter to drive expression.
In other words, he discovered a technique that would give you the tools to see if you had the promoter you're talking about, but does NOT itself allow you to express what gene you want where and when you want it. Promoter hunting is not a trivial thing and generally requires first that you have a native gene whose expression you want to mimick.
Again, I'm not a plant biologist, so I don't know of the state of plant promoters. In vertebrate cell biology, some good global promoters are known, while fewer tissue-specific promoters are known. Do you know a tissue specific plant promoter that would be suitable and has it been characterized in a useable plant (IE not arabidopsis?)
I think you can get significantly more celluse per-acre (at least with certain plants) than you can Sunflower oil. I also believe that Sunflowers might require more in the way of fertilizers and such (though I'm not so sure about that). Also, I believe extracting the oil from the sunflower seeds might be a somewhat 'expensive' process?
I believe the hope with something like this fungus is to find an extremely cheap way to generate large quantities of fuel using cheap, high-yield plants.
Who says you must use trees? The article summary mentions sawgrass as one possibility. Other possibilities include a variety of woody, fast growing plants (like, say, industrial hemp plants; or possibly bamboo; maybe there could finally be some good use for all the kudzu weed that grows all over the place in the south-eastern USA, with this fungus).
To say that trees are the only source of cellulose is certainly not correct; I don't think it's even correct to say it's the 'best' source.
you must be arguing out of stubbornness at this point
so the entire rationale for the usefulness of the green flourescent protein (indicating specific gene expression) is false?
"In vertebrate cell biology, some good global promoters are known, while fewer tissue-specific promoters are known."
you mean like, the gene for lactase (in the small intestine) or the gene for myoglobin (in muscles)? ;-P
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Having not only RTFA but also gone online and read a few more, it looks to me like:
- The research team emphasized that this is a long way from being a useful commercial process.
- OTOH, there are already patents for using this fungus as a pest control means so infrastructure and techniques already exist for commercializing it, though for different optimized properties.
- And, lastly, we're starting to see a Moore's law-ish speed of development of microorganisms. Which makes sense. Generations are measured in hours, so iterative improvement is incredibly fast. Computerized systems for testing and selection are themselves subject to Moore's Law. (Just look at what has happened to the price, speed, and complexity of gene sequencers.) And this is the kind of thing where human wave approaches *can* work, which makes the current massive levels of funding an effective multiplier.
So while I am not a biologist (IANAB), it seems to me that we should actually be *more* optimistic than a field researcher can allow themselves to be when speaking to the press of the long-term consequences of a major discovery. In short, I would say commercialization in three years or even less.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
If you haven't already, anybody who expects to have any clue about this at all should watch the Paul Stamets video of his presentation to the TED conference about fungi. And then buy and read Mycelium Running his overview book on the commercial and process implications of fungi. If you have any understanding of process engineering at all it will blow your mind.
The fungus in TFA is one of thousands that are only now being discovered and anybody who has done as I suggest above isn't likely to be terribly surprised at this news.
I know that I seem like I'm exaggerating, but effective exploitation of fungus-based techniques and technology may eventually be looked upon as more important than the development of the microchip. Seriously. And unlike microchips, fungus-based systems are done every day of the year in the basements of homebrewers, many of the /.ers.
IOW, if you find this stuff interesting, you can probably join the race to develop this stuff by the end of November. Which makes me glad that I live in Portland, home of tons of biotech companies and more beermaking experts then you can shake a bottleopener at.
Hell. yeah.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
If I could grow that on trees, I might as well be growing money.
-- haaz.
Well, when I was a kid, this guy kept asking everyone, "Ever eat a pine tree? Many parts of them are edible, you know!" But I was never tempted to try it...
Thus starting the apocalypse. Global warming increases, Skynet takes over the world, and judgement day falls upon us.
Stupidity only gets you so far, then you've gotta try
My wifes mushroom pasta has tasted like diesel for years.
Well you've elected obama right ? He brings "change" ?
You describe the change obama brings quite well actually.
Obama - not my president.
...I want a mushroom that manufactures psychedelic drugs as it grows. That'd be magic !
Squirrel!
Silly rabbits... you don't use the fungus directly... you take an off the shelf bacteria, put the gene set for producing the enzymes that convert cellulose into Diesel Fuel into your stock bio-bugs, and drop them into a bioreactor with a delicious cellulose slurry and the proper conditions to grow and digest.
you supplement the process with whatever the bugs need to grow fat and sassy, and you let them crank out deisel by the metric tonne... The fact that you can now make fuel out of waste paper, farm stubble, grass clippings, leaf litter, sawdust, rushes and reeds, even seaweed, means that you now have a clean green fuel source that potentially makes methanol look lame, and with proper distillation you can extract jet fuel, heating fuel, and power generation fuel for the world without adding a single new carbon atom to the environment.
This is an amazing development and needs to be pursued immediately. It could literally provide the necessary gap between weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels while we build up other clean alternative energy sources. As a key stroke in a sane energy future this technology would prove invaluable.
Patagonia is more like Sweden than Brazil. There's a reason we don't talk about a Swedish rainforest -- the near-polar climate can't provide the required rainfall.
There is no rainforest in Patagonia.
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Nonsense. Things will be GREAT...for the first 3.5 years.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
(For the clueless: Link)
Or, you know, compost?
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
The humans are dead, already.
"Little is much when little you need."
I'm posting from work, so I can't check to see if the link is to the same NPR interview I heard yesterday. In that on there was mention that the discoverer has three patents on the fungus.
Do people think that enough univeristy research would have been funded without patenting the fungus? I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one here that finds the idea of getting a patent on a naturally occurring fungus a little silly.
Think about this.
A soybean plant grows all summer long, storing up energy in the soybean, leaves, roots and stalk.
Farmer runs over the plant with a combine, ripping it out of the ground. The combine shakes the beans off and throw the stalks, leaves, and roots back on the ground then plows it under. Natural bacteria feed on the energy stored in the roots, stalks and leaves.
This method would divert the energy taken by the natural bacteria into a energy stream that would be used by the farmers combine, or allow him another revenue stream. The waste product from the diesel production would be plow under to act as fertilizer for next years crop.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
The algae Botryococcus braunii can create significant amount of chemicals with similar usefulness. Algae is fast-growing, and are able to capture more light than vascular plants and comparatively 'mega' fauna.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botryococcus_braunii
Not to say there aren't drawbacks. Biggest drawback is that other species of algae, i.e. weeds, start growing in an open-air algae farm. Closed systems, akin to a greenhouse, are less vulnerable but more expensive.
Not to disregard this fungal discovery with a wave of the hand. The more tools at hand, the better, right?
Not all rain forests are 'tropical'. Sections of Chile, along with the Pacific Northwest of North America, Japan, New Zealand, and parts of China are 'temperate' rain forests.
There is a rainforest in Patagonia. It's a temperate, as opposed to tropical, rainforest. Patagonia is a large area, and diverse, varying from near (ant)arctic to almost warm.
"Driving up the cost of paper increases the cost of education. More expensive education hits people of low income the hardest. People of low income are disproportionally not of white european descent.
Therefore, biodiesel from cellulose is a racist abomination and should be taxed to hell or abolished immediately. And dare to write any racist drivel telling me that I'm wrong." /sarcasm.
Now excuse while I wash my keyboard with bleach.
An Anon Coward said
Obama - not my president.
If you live in America, he's your president. Live with it.
You don't like it, move someplace else.
How do you like that?
I've spent 8 years with that dead raccoon corpse of a president, George W. Bush,
stapled to me every time I talked to someone who lived outside of the US.
Feel embarrassed if you like, but don't ever pretend you're a US citizen and
deny that you have a president.
No i didn't vote Obama. Thus thus making him - not my president either
Stupidity only gets you so far, then you've gotta try
Thank you for your closely reasoned and penetrating analysis. I hereby stand (or rather, sit) corrected. When you're through with that bleach, could I use some of it?
...is a relatively common fungus documented far and wide. It is widely documented as exhibiting useful antimicrobial properties as well as being partially responsible for potato rot.
The remarkable thing is not that the fungus produces hydrocarbons at all but that someone merely bothered to notice. If we were better noticers by any measure, we would find a universe of solutions (and problems) to keep us busy and confused for eternity. At least this finding and many like it will spur us to be more actively curious.
So far, the claims are great, the peer reviewed material is sketchy, the collaboration and acknowledgment is non-existent, the claims to patent holdings are premature, the self-promotion is gargantuan, and the principle researcher involved has a checkered past with regards to each of the above. While this does not bode well for him personally, I am glad there are folks like him out there working.
Even Mario knows that mushrooms power you up.