Making butanol from plants

As a chemical for industrial processes, butanol is used in everything from oil brakes, paint thinners, to plastics. Butanol made from plant materials could replace butanol butanol made from gasoline, according to a University of Illinois researcher.

Hans Blaschek, a microbiologist at the College of Agricultural Sciences, Customer and Environment in Illinois, said: 'You can drive cars with 100% butanol, but butanol is valuable as a chemical. much more - about 3 times - compared to liquid fuel '.

Butanol has properties that make it a good liquid fuel - it burns cleaner and has higher energy than ethanol, but it is more expensive at the present time.

Blaschek said: 'It will replace gasoline and can be used as liquid fuel, but now it's too expensive to use that way. Currently, butanol is as valuable as propelene '.

He studied microorganisms used in fermentation for more than 25 years. About 10 years ago his Illinois lab had made a progress in developing a mutant soil bacterium called Clostridium beijerinckii that produced higher butanol concentrations when added to a jar of plant material. .

It can be easily compared - the role of Clostridium beijerinckii in butanol production is similar to the role of yeast in ethanol production.

Blaschek explains: 'One of the advantages of Clostridium is that unlike enamel that only uses six carbon sugars, this creature can use 5 or 6 carbon sugar, so you are not restricted. You can use alcohol, biomass, or anything that can form sugar and ferment. Clostridium eats both of the above, and it is its natural action. You don't have to stimulate them like we have to do for the past 20 years for yeast. '

Ethanol (Photo: hydrocarbons-technology.com)

Because the mutant microbial strain produces higher butanol concentrations, it is the basis for Tetravitae BioSciences, a local company that has licensed the University of Illinois microbial line and is expanding to use microorganisms. objects on a large scale.

'When we conducted our first study 10 years ago and created a mutant microbial strain, we did not carefully follow the complex molecular biology methods. We did it by force and succeeded. However, the problem with this method is that you don't know if this genetic modification produces better productivity. '

Blaschek's latest research on Clostridium has focused on gene levels. He said: 'In 2004 we proposed the Department of Energy to create a parent line. After obtaining the sequence information, we can perform an evaluation between the two lines - one that produces a lot of butanol and one parent line - to find out if this genetic modification is responsible for this attribute. '

In the laboratory, these two lines are fermented separately. Specimens are taken during fermentation. RNA isolation and micro-technology are used to identify the amount of RNA present at a given time in the fermentation process.The more RNA there is, the more proteins there are. This process is done for 500 different genes.

Blaschek found that the amount of RNA produced for some enzymes involved in the process of forming enzymes in the mutant line was much higher than that of the original type. There are also differences in the ability to produce spores of mutant lines.

This creature does not produce butanol until later in the fermentation process. So if you can power this creature into the next physiological state, it's the spore formation, you can make it produce less or more butanol.

Blaschek concludes: 'The next step is to use the acquired knowledge and create the next generation line without using coercive methods, but really learn thoroughly and specifically to create genetically modified genes according to How to have specific goals. You can get the original line and mutate the gene to achieve the desired attribute. Now that we have string information, we know where those genes are located. '

The study was published in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology in January 2009.