President Bush and others are promoting more use of plant-based
material to fuel our vehicles. Scientists say they’ve taken an
important step toward more efficient production of bio-fuels. Chuck
Quirmbach reports:
Transcript
President Bush and others are promoting more use of plant-based
material to fuel our vehicles. Scientists say they’ve taken an
important step toward more efficient production of bio-fuels. Chuck
Quirmbach reports:
Biofuel producers say they need to get a common plant sugar called
xylose to ferment to get an efficient conversion of plant material into
fuels like ethanol.
Researchers from the US Forest Products Lab and the Department of
Energy are working on the problem. They say they’ve now completed a
genetic map of a yeast that helps xylose ferment faster.
Micro-biologist Thomas Jeffries says with the new information about the
yeast, researchers plan to do more genetic tweaking:
“Well, we’ve been able to increase the specific fermentation rate of
this organism with one of our mutations, we’ve been able to increase it
by 50%, we really are aiming to get a four-fold increase.”
But Jeffries cautions there are still many steps before the work with
the yeast might pay off at your local gas station.
For the Environment report, I’m Chuck Quirmbach