Hacked Fat-Burning Cycle Makes Bacteria Pump Biofuel

Wired Science
By John Timmer, Ars Technica
August 12, 2011 10:30 am

The majority of plant matter we have available to produce biofuels comes in the form of cellulose, a long polymer of sugars. It’s easiest to convert this material to ethanol, but that creates its own problems: Ethanol is less energy dense than petroleum-based fuels, and most vehicles on the road can’t burn more than a 15 percent mix of ethanol and standard gasoline.

These disadvantages have led a number of labs to look into ways of using a cellulose feedstock to produce something more like standard fuels. In yesterday’s Nature, researchers proposed a clever way of doing this: take the biochemical pathway that normally burns fat and run it in reverse.

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