Nov. 29, 2012 One reason that biofuels are expensive to make is
that the organisms used to ferment the biomass cannot make
effective use of hemicellulose, the next most abundant cell wall
component after cellulose. They convert only the glucose in the
cellulose, thus using less than half of the available plant
material. "Here at the EBI and other places in the biofuel
world, people are trying to engineer microbes that can use
both," said University of Illinois microbiologist Isaac Cann.
"Most of the time what they do is they take genes from different
locations and try and stitch all of them together to create a
pathway that will allow that microbe to use the other sugar."
Cann and Rod Mackie, also a U of I microbiologist, have been
doing research at the Energy Biosciences Institute on an
organism that they think could be used to solve this problem.
Mackie, a long-distance runner, found the microbe in the garbage
dump of a canning plant while running in Hoopeston, Ill., in
1993. He noticed that the ground was