14 DAY TRIAL // Pandas are utterly adorable, and pretty much everybody loves them. Still, odds are greenheads will love them even more once they learn that microbes in their poop can help make biofuels both cheaper and easier to produce.
Scientists have recently announced that, after analyzing poop samples collected from Ya Ya and Le Le, i.e. two giant pandas now living at the Memphis Zoo, they came across over 40 species of microbes that could help boost ethanol production.
The American Chemical Society explains that, for the time being, ethanol is the most common alternative fuel used by people living in the United States.
The only problem is that those who are in the business of producing it mainly rely on corn and other food crops as their raw materials.
This means that, the more popular ethanol gets, the more strain it places on agricultural lands and the more the country's food industry suffers.
The 40 microbial species found in Ya Ya and Le Le's poop are expected to help solve this problem by making it possible for ethanol producers to effectively use non-food material, i.e. plant waste and crops grown precisely for this purpose, as their raw material.
More precisely, the microbes are said to be highly effective in breaking down lignocellulose, thus making the process of fermenting non-food material in order to obtain ethanol faster and cheaper.
The bacteria and the enzymes they carry are expected to also help turn sugars obtained from lignocellulose into oils and fats for biodiesel production.
“The time from eating to defecation is comparatively short in the panda, so their microbes have to be very efficient to get nutritional value out of the bamboo. And efficiency is key when it comes to biofuel production – that’s why we focused on the microbes in the giant panda,” specialist Ashli Brown, Ph.D., explains.
“We have discovered microbes in panda feces might actually be a solution to the search for sustainable new sources of energy. It’s amazing that here we have an endangered species that’s almost gone from the planet, yet there’s still so much we have yet to learn from it,” the researcher adds.