Process Uses Community of Microbes to Turn Waste Plants Into Better Biofuel

By combining the fungus Trichoderma reesei and genetically modified E. coli, Michigan Engineering professor Nina Lin has developed a way to turn corn stalks and leaves into improved biofuel. The process breaks down waste plant materials into a sugar, which is then turned into isobutanol. Lin and her team argue that their isobutanol could be better than ethanol and other biofuels because it can be dropped into the fuel tank or pipeline without any disruption or corrosion. Gallon for gallon, isobutanol also gives off 82 percent of the heat energy gasoline provides when burned - compared to ethanol's 67 percent.

Transcript

00:00:00 we've come up with a really a new way to make biofuels meaning that we can take a very cheap fish stocks like corn stalks and leaves and turn them into really useful fuels and the trick is we're using a whole bunch of different microbes together instead of one it's relative easy to have to have someone to very well in one thing but very hard for that person to do very well everything

00:00:27 and similarly for microbes you cannot really expect one to be able to achieve everything in this very complicated process so we would like to use the synergy or the combined efforts of different partners the way this technology works is that we use a co culture of different microbes that each perform a different task in the overall process of converting plant biomass such

00:00:54 as corn stalks and leaves into biofuels the reason we like to use the con stalks and leaves versus steak on is that these are very abundant few stalks and also really doesn't compete with food which is a very big issue when people talk about biofuels it's a very simple process in the sense that we can accomplish this in a single vessel the fungus produces enzymes that break down

00:01:21 the biomass into its component sugars and then the bacteria will eat those sugars and trim them into isobutyl all I so butanol is a synthetic fuel molecule it has better properties than most of the things that we talked about in the news example as you know and the biodiesel it's really what we could jump in biofuel it means you can tap it in in the

00:01:44 current infrastructure including the energy and also the transportation facilities like pipelines we are hoping that biofuels made in such an efficient way can eventually replace some of the current petrol based biofuels but we also believe that the methodology were developed you can extend it to other bio chemicals so hopefully we can also use this approach to make chemicals that can

00:02:15 be used in many aspects of our life so we think that this could be a really useful technology for having having a platform for producing sustainable fuels and chemicals from renewable biomass you