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Improving Nature's Top Recyclers
aarondubrow sends in this snippet from an article at the Texas Advanced Computing Center:
"Over billions of years, fungi and bacteria have evolved enzymes to convert abundant cellulosic plant matter into sugars to use as energy sources to sustain life. It's a great trick, but unfortunately, these enzymes don't work fast enough...yet. So computational scientists at NREL, in collaboration with a large experimental enzyme engineering group, set about trying to understand and design enhanced enzymes to ... lower the cost of biomass-derived fuel to serve the global population (abstract)."
I can see it now ... Scientists engineer super-enzyme which wipes out all plant matter upon escape, wiping out all plant life. ;-)
I'm sure it's a highly unlikely scenario, but I hope this isn't something which has some really bad unintended consequences.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
This zero potential for horrendous side effects...
I thought the speciality of the Texas Universities was Creationism.
Well ... they are creating something, right?
The fungi and bacteria beg to differ.
And east coast universities specialize in tanning, while west coast universities specialize in bong rips (not that other universities aren't competitive there, more that they just don't get the same level of funding as universities in California).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I thought the speciality of the Texas Universities was Creationism.
No, you're thinking of the high schools.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
No, you're thinking of the textbook review board of the Texas Board of Education, which has nothing to do with universities in Texas. They only set the standards for the free textbooks in public schools K-12.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
they're leaving anyway, why continue all this pretending until we have nothing (even babys) left at all? scared? see you there anyway? that's the spirit?
.
Or does anybody else see a potential problem with accelerating the rate at which bacteria and fungi can convert biomass into puddles of sugary goo? My house is biomass, my clothes are biomass, my family and I are biomass... It's already hard enough to kill unwanted fungi, ask anybody who has had athlete's foot. If it were aggressive and fast, think what a nightmare you could have.
There's no need for this. If the government would remove the ban on industrial hemp we would have all the fuel we could ever need.
--- If the bible proves the existence of God, then Superman comics prove the existence of Superman.
I'm going to fire a full salvo here, as an industrial chemist acutely involved in this area of research.
>abundant cellulosic plant matter
Oh yeah. I can't not remember a 30-year-old book I read that the most pressing problem in converting biomass into fuel is not processing, but the lack of availability of cheap biomass. The price of oil has to go up significantly and remain at that price for years in order for biomass to become competetive. The situation has not changed.
>into sugars
Converting cellulose into sugars makes little sense by enzymatic processes given that land suitable for growing trees is rather efficiently maintained for timber and pulp production. Real "arable land" suitable for food production is used for that already. In both cases, the key word is "added value": timber, pulp and food are all higher value than energy.
>these enzymes don't work fast enough
And what about elementary reaction kinetics, transport processes and these things called physical absolutes? As we nicely see from the simulation, the enzyme does not attack the very crystallinity of cellulose directly. Cellulose has hard crystalline domains that have an intermolecular hydrogen-bonded structure not unlike that of kevlar. I can't see how this research shows practical ways to overcome this in a energetically feasible way. Nor does the bacteria do anything lignin, which would be analogous to the human attack on lignin: pump the mix full of base (lye) and nucleophiles (sulfide). Lignin forms a rather hard-to-deal with network of giant polymer, if you don't destroy it. Rather, the enzyme seems to "peel off" a cellulose strand at a time, which is necessarily slow. Furthermore, bacteria-based processes generally work at slow speed at high dilutions in water, which is not generally cost-wise acceptable in the energy or even bulk chemicals business. I've seen processes thrown out, out of hand, for this very reason.
Another underappreciated fact in this business is that even trivial-sounding operations are expensive in relation to the added value of the whole process. A dollar a kilogram here or there isn't that much of problem in fine chemicals, but cents a kilogram can make or break an energy-producing process. In this case, I am very concerned of the pretreatments suggested. It's no secret how to degrade biomass into a more processable form - we've seen rather good technologies for years and decades already - but the dealbreaker is whether it's actually profitable, not if it's simply technologically feasible.
Don't worry, this protein will be Intellectually Designed.
The smart people say that socialist economies are the worst - where recycling exists, this is entirely untrue! Due to the poverty, recycling is a very profitable enterprise. China has one of the world's best recycling rates, and the reason is due to the huge number of people who recycle.
Unfortunately, Chinese don't recycle because of belief in socialism, they recycle because of the profit motive. :( Ideally, belief in cooperative management of allocation of resources would be the motivation. It is not. Chinese people selfishly recycle because they can profit from it. Recyclers do not benefit from nationalization of the means of production, they benefit directly from how much work they put in towards their own personal goals. It is a pity that such capitalist (*spit*) motivations can result in such positive (environmentalist) outcomes. *mourn*
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I thought the speciality of the Texas Universities was Creationism.
have to do with chemical engineering? Creationist = ! complete lack of knowledge.
Not completely off topic, I saw the headline and was immediately reminded that I sure wish there were a supply of dung beetles for temperate zones in the U.S. That way I wouldn't need to clean up all the dog poop in the back yard every week.
You can buy ladybugs and mantids through the mail, why not dung beetles?
I suspect though that they may not like dog poop any more than I do, and will fly off to the local zoo or nearby farms or hippie vegan communes where herbivores live
More music, fewer hits
Mod this up please.
Build an oscillating time machine where the fungus exits out of the start of the feedback loop after it oscillates 1300 times. Just make sure that none of your engineers try to put themselves in the time machine or your stock price may plummet.
Why do people keep thinking they can "improve" nature without any consequences?
"The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well."
I've always seen Cellulosic ethanol and whatnot as a kind of cold fusion project. Beyond the difficulty of the process, why do we even need a new way of converting plant matter to this or that? We already have an awesome way to extract something useful from cellulose: fire. We can burn it no problem, and we have been developing the means to extract energy from that burning for the past several thousand years. It doesn't release extra CO2 into the atmosphere, because the trees have already extracted it. Burning just completes the cycle. (Oil and coal are different because that carbon is currently locked away, not part of the ecosystem)
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"