Turning seaweed into biofuel | Nature Biotechnology


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Access through your institution Buy or subscribe Much of the dry biomass in seaweed is locked up in the form of sugars such as alginate, mannitol and glucan that most industrial microbes


cannot metabolize. In a feat of genetic engineering, Wargacki _et al_. have succeeded in creating a strain of _Escherichia coli_ capable of converting a large bulk of this sugar into the


biofuel ethanol. Most of this inaccessible sugar is present as alginate, a linear copolymer of two uronic acids. To metabolize alginate into ethanol, the researchers expressed over 20 new


genes from three different species (_Vibrio splendidus_ 12B01, _Pseudoalteromonas_ sp. A1 and _Agrobacterium tumefaciens_) in _E. coli_ and deleted seven endogenous genes to ensure efficient


fermentation into ethanol rather than other by-products. Using culture techniques that do not require any chemical, thermal or enzymatic pretreatments before fermentation, the authors


achieved an ethanol titer of almost 5% volume/volume, reaching yields of over 80% of the maximum theoretical yield based on the sugar composition in seaweed. Seaweed is an especially


attractive feedstock for biofuel production because its cultivation does not take valuable farmland away from other crops. (_Science_ 335, 308–313, 2012) This is a preview of subscription


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ACCESS OPTIONS: * Log in * Learn about institutional subscriptions * Read our FAQs * Contact customer support Authors * Jason Kreisberg View author publications You can also search for this


author inPubMed Google Scholar RIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS Reprints and permissions ABOUT THIS ARTICLE CITE THIS ARTICLE Kreisberg, J. Turning seaweed into biofuel. _Nat Biotechnol_ 30, 251


(2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.2161 Download citation * Published: 07 March 2012 * Issue Date: March 2012 * DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.2161 SHARE THIS ARTICLE Anyone you share the


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