- Shashank Venkatesan
Imagine being able to produce huge amounts of sustainable bio-fuels from organisms or cellular structures in the size ranges of micrometers. This has been the wishes and goals of many scientists within the field of biotechnology. Biofuels such as ethanol when discovered, were set to be the future of the world. However certain hiccups along the way have delayed this change from occurring at a faster rate. First, the number of enzymes required in the conversions was too high. Other problems such as inefficient hydrolysis and impurity of the end products to be used as biofuels could not be ignored.
However, we very well may have turned over a new leaf and achieved the dreams of many scientists with the invention of a revolutionary process, Consolidated Bio-Processing or CBP for short. CBP brings in all the steps required to produce biofuels within a biological processing unit in organisms. It all happens within a matter of minutes rather than hours. The polysaccharide Xylan has especially been a huge area of interest as the pentose sugar in it(xylanose) can be broken down to ethanol easily if sufficient enzymes are present. This has been clinically achieved in two ways:
- Usually in Saccharomyces cerevisiae(yeast), the cells are unable to breakdown pentose sugars. However, when the miniscaffoldin protein genome sequence of Clostridium thermocellum was engineered into the yeast’s gene sequence by plasmids so as to produce the enzymes such a xylanase necessary for the conversion of Xylan to xylanose and finally breaking it down to ethanol. This also functions as a way to remove dried crop as the substrate that the yeast feeds on is wheat hay.
- In Tobacco plants, gene cassettes; which are pre-extracted sequence of genes stored for future use, were introduced into the leaf plastome sequence, and did two things. First, the increased the amount and quality of Xylan produced by the plant and second, they produced more efficient enzymes for the conversion of the present Xylan in the cell walls to ethanol. Xylan plays an important role in the cell structure of plants and the presence of abundant amounts of Xylan makes this an ideal source for bio-ethanol production. The ability of tobacco plants to grow in more general soils and being easier to genetically alter compared to other plants also aids in this process. At the end of the day, Consolidated Bio-Processing seems to already have major attention in the biotechnological industry in its infant stages. As this process becomes more refined and newer avenues for the process are discovered, it will surely steer the wheel towards a much more sustainable universe. To put it simply, we mostly are seeing the infant stages of a process that is going to form the cornerstone of a new revolution within the biotechnological world and beyond.
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