Laurent Ye
Joined: Dec 21, 2008
Posts: 54 (view all)
Poster Rank:
Talkative
User is
Offline
Country: Canada
Province/State: Quebec
City: Montréal
|
Cyanobacteria Power
June 16, 2009 - 12:29 PM
|
|
As publishd in the Weekly Green issue of December 8, 2008
Cyanobacteria, commonly called blue-green algae, can now be used as a new source of energy, thanks to the works of two researchers from the University of Texas, in Austin. The implantation of a new group of genes, the Acetobacter xylinum, permitted Dr. R. Malcolm Brown Jr. and Dr. David Nobles Jr. to create a new form of cyanobacteria that can produce cellulose, glucose and saccharine, a type of simple sugar used to produce ethanol.
This type of new bacteria brings many advantages. First of all, it can be cultivated by using salty water in producing installations located on non farming soil. Secondly, the new cyanobcteria is photosynthetic. That, my friends, means that it possesses the magical power to use light as a source of energy in order to grow and produce cellulose and various kinds of sugar. Thirdly, the cultivators don’t need to damage the cyanobacteria to get their product (unlike, other types of culture like corn and sugar canes where you have to decapitate all the poor plants in order to get the product). Not only the cyanobacteria do all of these wonderful things, but it can also fix the atmospheric azoth (as well as the carbon dioxide) without having to use fertilizers. Lastly, the cellulose made by the bacteria can be easily transformed into ethanol. It’s not the case with the cellulose gathered from other plants. By using the bacteria’s cellulose, we will be able to skip several transforming steps, steps which cost a lot of money (to sum it up, the cyanobacteria lets you economize cash!).
Presently, the corn cultivators are subjected to a lot of pressure. People want them to cultivate more and more corns for non-food sources. In Brazil, the sugar canes cultivators also face a lot of stress for they are asked to exploit the Amazonian forest in order to produce more. The use of cyanobacteria might not end all of these problems, but it still constitutes a very interesting alternative. “The cyanobacteria are potentially a low-cost source of ethanol and biofuel. These bacteria are also a form renewable energy”, says Dr. Nobles. “Gasoline is a precious resource. We should actually use it to produce useful objects rather than to just burn it up and transform it into harmful gas”, added Dr. Brown. After depositing their patent on their discovery, the two professors will try to find a more effective method to produce cyanobacteria.
Source : http://www.utexas.edu/news/2008/04/23/biofuel_microbe/
For more information, please visit weeklygreen.ca
|
Home
Community
Author
Post
