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Pests May Soon Be Seen As Allies
in Energy Rrisis
By
Ian Hoffman
As oil companies scour the globe
for new drilling spots,
microbiologists are looking for
the keys to an energy revolution
— inside termites from the
jungles of Costa Rica.
The head of the federal Joint
Genome Institute in Walnut Creek
reported Friday at one of the
world's largest scientific
conferences that his researchers
are closing in on the genes that
enable bacteria-packed termites
to turn woody plant materials
into sugars, natural gas and
hydrogen.
If the effort succeeds, biotech
companies could use the
information to grow new enzymes
and modified germs to churn out
enormous quantities of biofuels
burnable in automotive engines.
"I think in 10 years we're going
to see significant percentages
of the transportation fuel
replaced" by biologically
produced fuels, said Eddy Rubin,
director of the Walnut
Creek-based institute,
established by three federal
labs operated by the University
of California.
Decoding the DNA inside the guts
of termites is a small but
critical step in shifting from
fossil fuels — storing solar
energy gathered by plants
thousands of years ago — to
biofuels that store solar energy
from the last growing season.
One of the costliest elements of
producing biofuels is the
enzymes needed to break down the
structural materials of plants,
called lignocellulose, and turn
it efficiently into sugars that
can be fermented into fuel such
as ethanol.
Termites do this easily, aided
by several hundred different
kinds of bacteria living in
their guts. To explore that
symbiotic relationship,
scientists are diving into the
viscous brown world where plants
are destroyed and a whole
society of germs feed
themselves, as well as the
termite.
"It's like toothpaste. It's full
of wood fibers and particles,"
said Falk Warnecke, a
microbiologist working in the
institute's microbial ecology
program. Its scientists are
working on the termite with
colleagues at Caltech and
Diversa, a San Diego company
that specializes in building DNA
libraries from the natural world
for human commercial
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