Fungal fuel (Producing diesel with yeast.)

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/55382/

Fungal fuel

Jack Newman, senior vice president of research and co-founder of biotech company Amyris, once believed algae would serve as the next biofuel. As a young postdoc in the lab of University of California, Berkeley, synthetic biologist Jay Keasling, Newman floated the idea of starting an algal biofuel company at one of the informal pitch parties Keasling would hold for his students at his house.

But as Newman and his colleagues continued to brainstorm, they saw a major hurdle. Evolution hasn't achieved ultimate photosynthetic efficiency in plants and algae - only a small percentage of solar energy is converted to biomass - so human efforts to do so would be quixotic. "Nature's been trying to do that for billions of years," Newman says. "Wow, that's really hard."

…

Newman eventually cofounded Amyris with Keasling, Kinkead Reiling, and Neil Renninger to make ultra-low-cost antimalarial drugs using yeast cells. They also received funding from the Gates Foundation. Working with such a tractable and well-studied organism, Newman and his colleagues "got really good at building hydrocarbons," by feeding genetically modified yeast cells carbon and letting them do their thing. So they thought, why not use the yeast as a source of biofuels? "All the pieces are in the bug," Newman says. "It's a matter of fine-tuning."

The company performed scores of genetic manipulations, inserting genes from land plants into yeast cells and targeting a dozen or so steps in the Acetyl CoA glycolitic pathway to polymerize hydrocarbons into chains of optimal lengths for fuels. Then, about two years ago, Amyris scientists peered into their first test tube filled with yeast-produced diesel. The cells dine on inexpensive (and according to Newman, sustainably grown) sugarcane from Brazil, "eating" the carbon-rich, simple sugars, and converting them into more complex hydrocarbons called isoprenoids, along well-characterized metabolic pathways.

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[Fovea]

1. Yeast

Its not just for Merlot anymore.

[Ian David]

2. Yo mamma could fuel the sixth fleet. n/t