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New microbe turns sugary seaweed into fuel
Farming seaweed could be a cheap way to produce biofuel © Bio Architecture Lab
It may be slimy, slippery and rather unpleasant, but seaweed actually has a surprisingly wide range of uses, being a common source of food, chemicals, medicines and cosmetics. It may soon also be a source of biofuel, thanks to an engineered microbe able to transform seaweed directly into ethanol.
Seaweed has a number of important advantages over other biofuel feedstocks. Unlike maize and sugarcane, it isn't grown on fields that otherwise would be producing food and unlike wood and energy crops, such as switchgrass, it doesn't contain any lignin, which makes the sugar molecules in it much easier to release. More...
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2012/January/seaweed-biofuel-engineered-bacteria.asp
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