14 DAY TRIAL // Brainiacs at the University of California, Davis might argue that, under certain scenarios, biofuels can cause more damage to the environment than fossil fuels do, but this does not mean that human society should give up on this industry altogether.
Especially not when a cute-looking rainforest microbe (more or less) willingly promises to help make it easier for human society to turn biomass into eco-friendly fuels.
Scientists at the Joint BioEnergy Institute say that this knight-in-shining-armor type of microbe is quite gifted at breaking down lignin, i.e. a woody polymer that is commonly found in the walls of plant cells and whose job is to protect the cellulose sugars stored inside the plant.
The researchers explain that these cellulose sugars are the ones used to manufacture biofuels. The only problem is that, for the time being, they are quite difficult to obtain, precisely because lignin is doing such a great job at preventing access to them.
The Joint BioEnergy Institute researchers say that, according to evidence at hand, a rainforest microbe known as Enterobacter lignolyticus produces the right enzymes to break down lignin, and could therefore boost the efficiency of biomass-to-biofuel processes.
“Using a combination of transcriptomics and proteomics we observed the anaerobe Enterobacter lignolyticus SCF1 as it grows on lignin. We detected significant lignin degradation over time by absorbance, suggesting that enzymes in E. lignolyticus could be used to deconstruct lignin and improve biofuels production,” explains chemical engineer Blake Simmons.
“We found that E. lignolyticus SCF1 is capable of degrading 56-percent of the lignin under anaerobic conditions within 48 hours,” the researcher further details, as cited by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Future studies are expected to shed more light on the microbe's behavior, and even describe a way to use this discovery to boost biofuels production.
A detailed account of this investigation and its findings is available in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology (Microbial Physiology and Metabolism).