Caltech professor sees green energy in termite guts

NASA: Global Climate Change: Energy Innovations
07.16.12 38
By Bob Silberg

Some primal termite knocked on wood
And tasted it, and found it good,
And that is why your Cousin May
Fell through the parlor floor today.
— Ogden Nash

If you’ve had to deal with termites in your house, you probably hate their guts. But not Jared Leadbetter. He loves termites, especially their guts!

"It turns out termites do something we'd like to do," said Dr. Leadbetter, a microbiologist at Caltech. That something is turning wood into biofuel, and doing it at a nice, civilized temperature, pressure and acidity level.

But what Leadbetter is after isn't really the biofuel termites use to power their daily functions, it's the substance they convert wood into on the way to forming what they ultimately use for energy -- an intermediate substance called "pyruvate."

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