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Biotechnology & fuelsBio fuels have been around for many years, for as long as any one can remember wood has been burnt as a source of heating and used in cooking, plant matter has always been used to produce methane, a gas which can also be used to provide heat and is totally natural.However, scientists with the help of biotechnology are studying new and more efficient ways of providing a natural form of gas. Scientist say the future of bio fuel rests on cellulose or more specifically ethanol. Where does ethanol come from? Ethanol is typically made from the kernels of corn, with corn being composed of starch and simple sugars which easily dissolve in water, once the sugar has been dissolved they are easily fermented by yeast to give us ethanol. The cellulose is the part of the corn which is left over after harvesting the corn kernels, it is the stalks, leaves and parts of the plant that are thought of as crop residues which are made up of ethanol. While this seems like an ideal solution to a more natural and more environmental friendly form of fuel, it does have its problems, as recently as 2001 deriving ethanol from cellulose was very expensive. That was until enzyme producers got together and reduced the cost of enzyme based production of ethanol from cellulose. How is the cellulose extracted? Cellulose has to broken down into sugar and this can be achieved by two methods, one way is to treat the cellulose with chemicals and the other by treating it with enzymes. Enzymes break the chemical bond between molecules or to make it easier to understand and simpler, think of the cellulose as being a line of ping pong balls which are strung together, with the balls being the sugar. Enzymes will then attack the balls or sugar and cut them apart into single ones that yeast can then access. The yeast then ferments the sugar and turns it into ethanol. However due to the very high cost of enzymes, two of the goals that scientists were faced with were reducing the amount of enzymes which were needed to cut the ping pong balls apart and to reduce the cost and make it more cheaply. The plant that scientists chose was a common soil fungi which was able to make a lot of enzymes with which to break down the cellulose, while it produced a lot of enzymes scientists still had to work to modify it to make them work faster and at the same time make the enzymes more cheaply. Getting them to work faster was a matter of finding which enzymes worked better at a higher heat. High temperature was critical because the chemical reaction such as breaking down the cellulose happened more quickly at higher temperatures. The goal was achieved by inserting genes that made these enzymes, into the fungi they were using and then the fungus became the production organism that broke the cellulose down into sugar, which was in turn fed to the yeast. Industrial biotechnology today is providing an elegant solution to a cleaner and more efficient fuel from ethanol derived from cellulose and continues to strive towards perfecting the method and providing the general public with a cheaper alternative to gasoline. |
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