Bioengineered Bacteria Pump Out Fuel for Cars
Submitted by admin on August 27, 2012 – 5:52 pmNo Comment
(Innovation News Daily) A humble soil bacteria has become a genetically engineered factory capable of making fuel for cars. But the project still has to get out of the lab and scale up to industrial-size production.
The MIT project aims to make transportation fuels 10 times more efficiently than existing biofuels derived from living organisms. Researchers swapped out the genes of the R. eutropha bacterium so that it can create isobutanol — an alcohol that can replace or blend with gasoline used by vehicles.
“We’ve shown that, in continuous culture, we can get substantial amounts of isobutanol,” said Christopher Brigham, a biologist at MIT. READ MORE
