Scientists from the University of Exeter along with Shell, an oil and gas company, have found a way to make ordinary E. coli bacteria (or enterohemorrhagic bacteria, or simply E. coli) produce biofuels that can be used to fuel cars, trucks, and even airplanes.
Until today, biofuels were produced from a chain of hydrocarbon compounds of irregular shape and size. This allowed most modern internal combustion engines to “digest” it. Such fuel really works, but engines based on it most often turn out to be ineffective and wear out very quickly.
To use biofuels as the main alternative to fossil fuels, engines need to be specially modernized, or the fuel itself must undergo additional complex processing stages so that it ultimately turns out to be more suitable for these purposes.
John Love, Lead Research Specialist
To circumvent this requirement, scientists from the University of Exeter under the leadership of John Love took the genes of camphor tree, blue-green algae and connected them to the DNA chain of Escherichia coli. When the “modified” E. coli bacterium was fed with glucose, the enzymes produced by it converted sugar into fatty acids and then into hydrocarbons, which in their structural and chemical composition were identical to those found in traditional commercial fuels.
“We can biologically reproduce the fuel that energy companies produce and sell,” Love says.
At the moment, a team of scientists is thinking about how to scale up for the mass production of the necessary hydrocarbon.
Scientists fed E. coli glucose to plant production, but Love believes that, thanks to subsequent experiments, on an industrial scale, the bacterium can be forced to process both hay and manure into fuel. This means that for the production of biofuels it will not be necessary to use additional territories for sowing the feedstock, which otherwise would be used for sowing food crops.
Professor Paul Freemont of Imperial College London really enjoyed this discovery. The scientist expressed support for the fact that this approach will allow in the future to produce not only biofuels, but also be able to open the doors so that it can be used to create materials such as plastic, solvents and detergents, which are usually produced from refined oil.
The research work of the University of Exeter is partly funded by the scientific division of Shell Energy.
The article is based on materials .
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