The Yosemite Sam of the Microbial World, Hot Rodded Lichen, BYO Nitrogen, The Microbial Marx Brother, Sexy Hexy and More: The DOE Delves into New Orgamsism for Fuels & Chems

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) The meanest, nastiest, ornierest, heat-seeking organism ever found that munches biomass and other microbes that got a booster via the DOE’s $40M grants for advanced microbes R&D. And aromatics without the mess, a sky-vacumming organism and much more.

As we reported last week here, the U.S. Department of Energy announced $40 million in funding for 31 projects to advance research in the development of microbes as practical platforms for the production of biofuels and other bioproducts from renewable resources.

But Who Got What, exactly?

A lot of this round of support is about imaging – 13 projects in all. Looking at interactions with more precision – Ramen imaging, Scattirstorm, 3D imaging, you name it.

Another 10 essentially are working on optimization and discovery using more traditional bioconversion microorganisms and pathways. Clostridia that produce butanol, s.cerevisae used to produce ethanol and lactic acid, branched chain alcohols, eptanoic and suberic acid and more.

Finally and perhaps most newsy are the 8 projects that essentially delve into novel micro-organisms — ones not currently employed at scale in commercial bioproduction.

Lichens for biofuel precusrsors? Making designer bioesters from Yarrowia lipolytica? Butanol via Methylobacterium extorquens? Nitrogen fixation (and maybe CO2) via Synechococcus elongatus? A key biofuel precursor via Kluyveromyces marxianus? That’s edgy stuff, pardner.

Two stand out from the pack, as we see it. One, a collective. The other, perhaps the meanest, nastiest, ornierest, heat-seeking organism ever found that munches biomass.

One, a model coculture of photoautotroph-methanotroph, Synechococcus sp. PCC 7002 – Methylomicrobium alcaliphilum 20ZR aimed at better utilizing methane and carbon dioxide as feedstocks. Now, everyone want’s to use the waste materials from fossil fuels and the scourge of our farms and skies — making a process fast enough and valuable enough to produce an affordable fuel, that’s the trick. Keep in mind, fuel costs less than bottled water, so cheap is the word, and that means starting from otherwise valueless materials if possible and finding an organisms or a group that can robustly use them.

The other? Caldicellulosiruptor bescii, which grows optimally at 78°C, Bio-processing above 70°C can have important advantages over near-ambient operations. But as Michal Admas et al at the University of Georgia observe, “highly genetically modified microorganisms usually have a fitness disadvantage and can be easily overtaken in culture when contaminating microbes are present. The high growth temperature of extreme thermophiles precludes growth or survival of virtually any contaminating organism or phage.” READ MORE