Seaweed as Biofuel? Metabolic Engineering Makes It a Viable Option
(PhysOrg.com) Is red seaweed a viable future biofuel? Now that a University of Illinois metabolic engineer has developed a strain of yeast that can make short work of fermenting galactose, the answer is an unequivocal yes.
…(M)arine biomass can be easily degraded to fermentable sugars, and production rates and range of distribution are higher than terrestrial biomass, he (Yong-Su Jin, a U of I assistant professor of microbial genomics and a faculty member in its Institute for Genomic Biology)said.
“However, making biofuels from red seaweed has been problematic because the process yields both glucose and galactose, and until now galactose fermentation has been very inefficient,” he said.
But Jin and his colleagues have recently identified three genes in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the microbe most often used to ferment the sugars, whose overexpression increased galactose fermentation by 250 percent when compared to a control strain.
“This discovery greatly improves the economic viability of marine biofuels,” he said. READ MORE Abstract
