An insect pest that causes millions of dollars in damage might turn out to be a cheap source of fuel.
Termites eat wood and, unlike most animals, they can extract energy from it. But they don't do it alone. A variety of bacteria living in theinsect's gut do the work. Some of them break down wood fiber and produce sugars for the termite. That process produces hydrogen as a byproduct,which is then used by other bacteria in the gut. Falk Warnecke is a microbiologist with the U.S. Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute in California.These microbes make termites the most efficient hydrogen producers on the planet: From a single sheet of printer paper, a termite can produce two liters of the valuable gas.
The trick is to figure out which bacteria make hydrogen, and which enzymes they use to do it. With this information you could replicate those enzymes in mass quantities to produce hydrogen on a commercial scale. What's more, you could fuel the process with agricultural and industrial waste -- lumber-mill tailings, scrap cardboard, and the endless tons of corn husks and sugarcane stalks that are burned or discarded because they're too tough for farm animals to eat. "It's kind of recycling, making use of what's already there," says Warnecke.
SOURCES: U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute; online at:http://www.jgi.doe.gov/
"Bug Juice: Could termite guts hold the key to the world's energyproblems?" in the Eastbay Express (September 7, 2005); online at:http://www.eastbayexpress.com/Issues/2005-09-07/news/feature.html
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Cool beans. There's quite a rush on these days to do some serious bio-prospecting. There is tremendous potential from countless organisms such as these that produce various secondary metabolites that happen to be of significant economic importance. "Synthetic Biology" is going to be one of the buzzwords for the next biotech boom.
ReplyDelete2L from 1 sheet of paper, WOW. No other energy inputs except waste materials? Seems too good to be true.
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