Saving biofuels’ magic bugs from their own toxins

Biofuels Digest
by Thomas Saidak May 13, 2011

In California, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory announced that Joint BioEnergy Institute researchers have found a way to help microbes survive the toxicity caused by the very compounds that they secrete in order to produce biofuels. Many of the best candidate compounds for advanced biofuels are toxic to microbes, which presents a “production versus survival” conundrum.

Researchers at the DOE’s JBEI have provided a solution to this problem by developing a library of microbial efflux pumps that were shown to significantly reduce the toxicity of seven representative biofuels in engineered strains of Escherichia coli. Microbes employ various strategies for addressing cell toxicity but perhaps the most effective are efflux pumps, proteins in the cytoplasmic membrane of cells whose function is to transport toxic substances out of the cell.

Read more