Biofuel yeast enzyme

From Yenra

Announced February 24, 2009, Eckhard Boles, co-founder of the Swiss biofuel company Butalco GmbH and a professor at Goethe-University in Frankfurt, Germany, has discovered a new enzyme which teaches yeast cells to ferment xylose into ethanol. Xylose is an unused waste sugar in the cellulosic ethanol production process.

In industrial fermentation processes, the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is commonly used for ethanol production. Current bioethanol production technologies can use only parts of the plants, namely the storage sugars, like glucose, sucrose or starch. However, this technology is in competition with food and feed production. Eckhard Boles, co-founder of the Swiss biofuel company Butalco GmbH and a professor at Goethe-University in Frankfurt, Germany, has therefore searched for ways of teaching the microorganisms to convert waste sugars, xylose and arabinose, into ethanol. Now, Boles and his colleagues have succeeded in genetically modifying industrial yeast strains, thus producing ethanol from xylose in a single step. Having already succeeded in transforming arabinose into ethanol by genetically modified yeast strains, Boles and his team have now found an efficient way to convert most of the plants energy into biofuel.

Together with his company, Butalco GmbH, Boles is now constructing yeast strains to convert plant waste materials into biobutanol, which is being seen as an alternative fuel superior to ethanol for its more favourable chemical and physical properties.