Delft Breakthrough In Bioethanol Production From Agricultural Waste

Reported by redOrbit on Friday, 20 November 2009 (on November 20, 2009)

Car fuelBioethanol is made by the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae from sugars obtained from plant biomass. This microorganism also converts such sugars into ethanol (alcohol) in beer and wine. The production of bioethanol is rapidly increasing due to the growing use of bioethanol as a car fuel. With an annual world production of 65 billion liters, bioethanol is aready the largest product of the fermentation industrySecond GenerationBioethanol should of course preferably be produced from resources that do not compete with food production. For this reason, efforts are made to produce second-generation bioethanol, using agricultural residues such as wheat straw and corn stover. However, when the sugars from these raw materials are released, significant quantities of acetate are formed. Acetate can slow down or even halt bioethanol production by yeast.ByproductAnother challenge of the current bioethanol production process is that about 4% of the sugar is lost to formation of the byproduct glycerol. Glycerol formation was long considered to be an inevitable consequence of the production conditions during bioethanol production.Yeast genesTU Delft researchers have now solved these issues. Yeast can, at least in theory, also convert the harmful acetate to ethanol. As it turns out, just one single gene is missing in the yeast. By introducing a single gene from the bacterium Escherichia coli, researchers of the Netherlands-based Delft University of Technology and the Kluyver Centre for Genomics of Industrial Fermentation enabled this conversion of acetate to ethanol by yeast. This replaced the normal role of glycerol so efficiently that key genes in glycerol production could be removed, thus completely abolishing glycerol production.Three-in-one

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