E.coli bacteria can produce biodiesel

How can this bacteria produce biodiesel ? How it was known ? Lets find out!

Biodiesel can be made from plant oil or animal fat. Used cooking oil from restaurants for biodiesel is common, but for biodiesel to contribute significantly to reduce fossil fuel use, there needs to be a way of mas production of it from plant-derived raw materials. The problem is that synthesizing biodiesel is complicated. That’s where E. coli comes in.The bacteria, often discussed in terms of the human digestive tract, also acts as a catalyst in generating biodiesel by converting inexpensive sugars into fatty acid derivatives that are chemically similar to gasoline.


So Chaitan Khosla, a professor of chemistry and of chemical engineering at Stanford University, decided to investigate whether there might be a natural limit that holds back E. coli’s conversion capabilities. In other words, does the basic catalytic engine in E. coli have enough horsepower to do the job at the needed scale; but E. coli’s natural conversion capability is not upto the point .It has the incredibly powerful engine that makes fatty acids in E. coli is .It is capable of converting sugar into fuel-like substances at an extraordinary rate.It turns out that like any high performance engine, the catalytic process in E. coli can only attain peak efficiency when all the controls are tuned just right.                                              

Researchers managed to isolate all the enzymes and other molecular participants involved in the process that produces fatty acids in E. coli and assemble them in a test tube for study.By doing so, the team was able to study how the enzymes involved in fatty acid biosynthesis performed when they were free from other cellular influences. That was critical to their analysis, because the products in question, fatty acids, are essentially soap, and too much of them would hurt the bacteria. That is why E. coli has developed some very elaborate and effective ways to contain the amount of fatty acid biosynthesis inside the cell.The fatty acids can’t be pumped directly into your gas tank—cars and trucks won’t run on soap after all, but they are an excellent precursor to biodiesel.Biodiesel has so far lagged behind ethanol as a means of cutting fossil fuel use in vehicles because ethanol is easier and cheaper to make. But biodiesel has a higher energy density and lower water solubility than ethanol, which offer significant advantages. Thus it could easily be blended into diesel and gasoline, or used alone as a bona fide transportation fuel.

If researchers can figure out how to manipulate the cellular means of production in E. coli, biodiesel could be made cheaply enough that the little engine of E. coli could end up powering a lot of larger engines at far less cost to the environment than with fossil fuels.The reasearch is under process and they are promising to give such a new technique to create biodiesel.

[via: stanford university news]

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