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Engineered Stomach Microbe Converts Seaweed Into Ethanol
PolygamousRanchKid writes "Seaweed may well be an ideal plant to turn into biofuel. It grows in much of the two thirds of the planet that is underwater, so it wouldn't crowd out food crops the way corn for ethanol does. Because it draws its own nutrients and water from the sea, it requires no fertilizer or irrigation. Most importantly for would-be biofuel-makers, it contains no lignin—a strong strand of complex sugars that stiffens plant stalks and poses a big obstacle to turning land-based plants such as switchgrass into biofuel. Researchers at Bio Architecture Lab, Inc., (BAL) and the University of Washington in Seattle have now taken the first step to exploit the natural advantages of seaweed. They have built a microbe capable of digesting it and converting it into ethanol or other chemicals. Synthetic biologist Yasuo Yoshikuni, a co-founder of BAL, and his colleagues took Escherichia coli, a gut bacterium most famous as a food contaminant, and made some genetic modifications that give it the ability to turn the sugars in an edible kelp called kombu into fuel."
so thats the fuel problem solved then
So... how long until this microbe gets into the wild and we end up with an ocean of ethanol...?
And in other news, BP is now moving to Amsterdam.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Eat microbes. Have some sushi. Get drunk.
For the sake of argument, lets say it works and pretty soon the ocean is all fenced off like Nebraska and each family farmer (multinational corp) has their own little farm (ocean). All this does is push off the problems of over populating a little bit further all the while putting pressure new pressures on the environment. While kelp would capture CO from the atmosphere in equal parts to those exhausted when burnt, I'm sure we are not taking into account the other things it will be removing from the seas. What affect might that have? No one knows. While the Capitalist ethic of "Drive it hard and fix what breaks." is romantic, it is also dangerous and doesn't take into account the people they kill along the way. I think I'd prefer to have a substantive conversation on the population control instead of only looking for more resources to exploit. Eventually Malthus will catch up to us, why not stop running from him and face his challenge. Better now while only 7 billion people will have to suffer rather than 12 billion in 20 or 30 years.
If they can keep this GMO sequestered in a watertight tank and remember that it could possibly destroy the ocean it would help the population of the world. It's sort of silly, however, that they spent all those resources creating this GMO when hemp is a very common and old source for ethanol. But nooo, we don't want to upset the fine folks at Dow, Goodyear, or Monsanto do we. Let's forget hemp and create a new organism.
I'm sure that if we could introduce those fine folks to hemp ... or it's cousin 'weed' ... they would be much more amenable to growing it themselves for industrial purposes. Hell, if we threw in a bunch of cookies and milk they may even stop being evil for a few hours.
But considering the fact of global warming/climate change and the topic of greenhouse gases, isn't our core problem that we are simply burning too much stuff? With that in mind, is this really going to help?
Shouldn't our focus be on creating forms of energy that produce energy without burning things?
... in producing fire-breathing sea monsters.
Seaweed is a key component of the ocean ecosystem, providing a safe environment - and indeed a source of food - for other sea life. Mass harvesting seaweed would impact this broader ecosystem, and in unknown ways. At the least it could hurt fisheries. It might be nice to understand this impact before 'seaweed farmers' go out and clear cut huge swaths of seaweed forests!
Wasn't the sweet crude petroleum formed millions of years ago by decaying seaweed and soft bodied marine creatures? So in a way this enigneered microbe is just accelerating the natural process by about 100 million years.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Yet another inefficient solar collector that will save the world from oil dependence. I'm so sure we can scale up production to replace the 160 exajoules of energy provided by oil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil#Definition_and_energy_equivalents), which is what's currently required each year by industrial civilization.
Man, I just can't get enough of these "The energy crisis is solved!" stories. I've loved them since I was a kid in the 60s. Funny, how we're still gulping that oil though.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I figure after I eat those microbes I could get drunk just by eating seaweed. I could just live at the beach .. perfect.
Currently there are millions unemployed. They should be converted into bio-fuels so they can actually do something useful for this country.
I have a different proposal: Use Anonymous Cowards for that purpose.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
But seaweed is a food, so yes it would.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The WSJ had an article last month on the Cellulosic Ethanol Debacle. The various approaches just haven't worked at all. Try whatever tabletop approach catches your fancy but in the real world lignin just doesn't scale up to anything approaching meaningful commercial volumes, as of yet anyway. And our tax dollars go towards these attempts, keep in mind.
People have been fiddling about with these approaches for almost a century too, and making all manner of grandiose claims; I've parsed news clippings from the 1920s promising a coming era of limitless cheap ethanol to replace rock oil. It would take catastrophically high crude oil prices to really spur development here, but chances are we'd also turn to dirtier approaches like coal-to-liquids which are somewhat more profitable and scalable; or simply employ conservation to the point where the price would drop back down anyway. The International Energy Agency had an excellent document on approaches for
Saving Oil in a Hurry, which may be of interest.
The price is more reasonable in an Asian market. I picked up some dried seaweed for $4 for 150g. Now, consider that drying removes some 90% of the weight, it's really not such a bad deal. Naturally, there would be huge economies of scale associated with fuel production.
Nah, those are special species of seaweed, grown expressly for eating. This strategy works for seaweed in general, most of which is pennies to the ton because there's no pre-existing (human) use for it.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
We'll turn the entire ocean into BOOZE! :)
Hemp would still compete with crops for arable land.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Personally, I rather have a real biologist working on this than a synthetic one.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
If they can keep this GMO sequestered in a watertight tank and remember that it could possibly destroy the ocean it would help the population of the world. It's sort of silly, however, that they spent all those resources creating this GMO when hemp is a very common and old source for ethanol. But nooo, we don't want to upset the fine folks at Dow, Goodyear, or Monsanto do we. Let's forget hemp and create a new organism.
The above illustrates the problem of informing the uninformed about scientific developments.
What reproductive and survival advantage does E Coli get from having these modifications done? Right... none. So while it'll happily digest the seaweed in a lab, or even in a manufacturing tank, if you dump it into the ocean it will a) die from incorrect environmental osmolality and pH b) be eaten by a variety of sea creatures.
Introducing rabbits to Australia was FAR worse than dumping TONS of this stuff into the ocean. This bacterium is so far from being able to "destroy the ocean" that it would take a colossal act of ignorance to claim it as such. Oh wait...
I hope someone finds a way to convert weed into ethanol, and weed will be grown everywhere. That would be like a dream come true.
Or you could just smoke the weed and imagine it's getting you somewhere...
Oh wow man!
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
To say nothing of the carbon captured by the seaweed as it grows, and sequestered on the seabed. This sounds like a recipe for making climate change worse faster.
Korma: Good
Where will it come from? How will it be delivered?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You can't compare the edible seaweed in the market with seaweed for ethanol production. It's probably a completely different plant.
Probably? So you don't actually know anything relevant, but you decided to gift and delight us with your comment anyway? Too bad you didn't read the fine summary: "Synthetic biologist Yasuo Yoshikuni, a co-founder of BAL, and his colleagues took Escherichia coli, a gut bacterium most famous as a food contaminant, and made some genetic modifications that give it the ability to turn the sugars in an edible kelp called kombu into fuel." HTH, next time think for more than a tenth of a second before clicking submit.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You can't compare the edible seaweed in the market with seaweed for ethanol production. It's probably a completely different plant. Just like there are many different types of plants on land, there are many different types of plants in the sea.
Is.
Google will tell you.
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It can't destroy the ocean. E. coli probably can't even survive in the ocean and even if it could, it would have to compete with every microorganism that's already there for resources. There's a reason why they didn't just find a bacterium in the ocean that could already do this. It's chemically inefficient to produce alcohol as a waste product so few organisms do it and they only compete well in environments where organisms that use their energy more efficiently are otherwise limited.
The real problem with this technology is that it would damage the oceans through over-harvesting of seaweed.
"It grows in much of the two thirds of the planet that is underwater, so it wouldn't crowd out food crops the way corn for ethanol does. "
There is so much uneducated FUD about biofuel which only goes to show that the best of intentions among environmentalists and world hunger activists can have adverse environmental and social impacts. If use of corn for ethanol was an issue I would expect the vulnerable third world countries to be crying out for the US to sell them corn, but that isn't the case. The third world is attempting to curb the expansion of US production of corn. See e.g. http://prospectjournal.ucsd.edu/index.php/2010/04/nafta-and-u-s-corn-subsidies-explaining-the-displacement-of-mexicos-corn-farmers/ http://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/truth.pdf
If people want to solve a problem, at least decide what the problem is. What is the greater evil, too much or too little corn?
As a side note, seaweed biofuels may be a better solution to bio-fuels - or it may not. Treating the environment and problems of world hunger as questions with such a simple answer is dangerous.
Why have 1 person driving a backhoe when you could employ 20 with shovels?
Not long ago I watched a TV program that presented the work of Japanese scientist Izuru Senaha . He have found that seaweed grows optimally at 2% CO2 concentration (72 times the normal concentration in sea water). They use method (developed by Masanori Hiraoka) where the seaweeds are in constant motion to boost their growth.
He is making experiments by collecting CO2 from local power plants and using it to grow seaweed.
It would make a lot more sense to have farms for rapid growth than having to collect seaweed from the ocean.
This method alone could be great for collecting the carbon from the air and making it into solid form (thus reversing the greenhouse effect). But that would not be profitable on its own.
Will this work with aquatic milfoil? Because I know a few places that would be happy to part with theirs.
Have gnu, will travel.
Minor correction, the normal concentration in sea water is 0.035%. This means the 2% is actually about 57-60 times the norm.
I hope someone finds a way to convert weed into ethanol, and weed will be grown everywhere except the U.S.
Fixed that for ya.
Thank you, you have saved me from reading the article.
Well, alcohol is toxic for many organisms. An organism that can produce alcohol as a waste product of its metabolism could hence poison the food source for competitors. Provided, of course, that it doesn't suffer from it itself.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So that means if we start using Seaweed for Ethanol, you won't have enough left for a Sushi roll after we've used up perhaps a trillion metric shit-tons of seaweed!
I think the main problem would be competing with the already strained food-chain in the ocean... but that's going to be a problem after a million metric shit tons of seaweed are used.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
For example compared to the previous years?
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Let me guess - you're one of those lazy "can't find a job" leaches who all my tax dollars are going to!
You guessed wrong. I've got a job, and even if I were jobless, it would not be your tax dollars which would pay me. And I don't have a problem with paying for those having no job because I know that if I should lose my job then I'll get money, too, until I find something new.
And yes, there are some people abusing the system. But they are the minority.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Plus it may well require pre-processing of the seaweed before this can get at the sugars it feeds on, so it's possible it's unable to use live weed in the wild even in the absence of competing organisms.
It gets loose, we face a major eco disaster and the company sues anyone that dares to complain. This one's got me worried. We've already got overfishing and trawlers messing everything up. Pretty soon we'll see trawling for seaweed I suppose.
With all the weird, at least from our point of view, products on the Japanese market, how long do you think it will be before there is Kombu Whiskey on the shelves there, considering they would probably have to age it a bit first!
The corn we grow for ethanol isn't the same corn we grow to eayt. The important bit is that it takes up farmland that could otherwise be used to grow edible corn. Even if inedible (it's not, this is edible seaweed), this seaweed takes up space that could be used to grow edible seaweed. Same problerm, different crop.
Ever smelled a clump of dead seaweed?
There are LOTS of microorganisms that like to eat it.
Not all seaweed is food; actually as far as I can tell a small number of species are digestible by human beings. In fact, seaweed is tough enough and has enough chemical defenses that very few marine organisms can eat it either.
not only that, carbon sequestration is a good thing (tm)
Considering where our tax dollars are going, I think what you're trying to say he's part of the military industrial complex? All of those people are employed though, so I'm confused.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
explain how hemp is efficiently fermented into ethanol? hemp is traditionally a fibre crop, not really good for fermenting. you'd just end up with heaps of mush left over and not much ethanol.
what you did get out of it would be INSAAANE to drink though.
i'm too lazy to google.
read article.
the only pre-processing they did was grinding it up.
yes, because fuel companies will be buying their konbu at retail price.
konbu is used industrially to make MSG. lots of that stuff gets made. perhaps byproducts from this process could be used to make fuel (does the alginate survive? IANAChemist).
jelly?
i try to balance my own karma whoring with some healthy trolling.
the strain on the oceanic food chain is us catching all the fish.
if we wish to continue that, it would become our task to reduce the ensuing oversupply of food in the lower part of the food chain.
if we keep it in balance, it should be okay. remember how big the sea is. i wonder if, at 5% ethanol yield from the seaweed, how much we'd need to get through to meet current fuel demand?
of course, you'd want to supplement it with other things. we may only need a modest percentage of total demand from the seaweed, the rest coming from the hundreds of other energy sources being researched.
Kelp production was big business when it was used for explosives and soap. We didn't take over the Falkland Islands for the weather.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
... you really think that mankind will survive the next 100 years?
One day we will make some terrible, not reverseable mistake.
I always have a bad feeling about these things.