Self-Destructing Bacteria Create Better Biofuels 139
MikeChino writes "Researchers at Arizona State University have genetically engineered cyanobacteria to dissolve from the inside out, making it easy to access the high-energy fats and biofuel byproducts located within. To do this they combined the bacteria's genes with genes from the bacteriaphage — a so-called 'mortal enemy' of bacteria that cause it to explode. Cyanobacteria have a higher yield potential than most biofuels currently being used, and this new strain eliminates the need for costly and energy intensive processing steps."
Death to the pond scum! (Score:2, Funny)
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The bacteria has been observed to scream, before detonating, "allahu akbar!".
Biofuels are the future. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Biofuels are the future. (Score:5, Insightful)
Plants are the most efficient at collecting solar energy.
I'm not sure that's the case, but what plants are, is cheap.
-jcr
Everything is cheap until everybody starts collecting it.
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*Ahem* the basic premise is wrong. Plants are NOT the most efficient at photosynthesis. In fact, plants, in the most narrow definition of the word, are incapable of photosynthesis.
Plant cells do, however, contain a degenerate cyanobacter, there are a few different species but we call all of them "chloroplasts". Strictly speaking this part of plant cells is not actually plant in origin.
Just like animal cells are not actually capable of digesting food, and using it to convert ADP into ATP. We do however conta
Re:Biofuels are the future. (Score:5, Insightful)
What are you smoking? *Ahem* the basic premise is wrong. In fact, plants, in the most narrow definition of the word, are totally fucking capable of photosynthesis. Unless you just made up a definition of a plant. You see, its because plant cells do contain a degenerate cyanobacter that we call a "chloroplast." Strictly speaking, this part of plant cells is not actually plant in origin, but then if we're speaking strictly, neither is the DNA in the plant cells or the cell membrane or the cell wall because, you see, all of these come from these really old bacteria and the plant just STOLE them! And called themselves living things! Ugh, it makes me sick. "Actually," it doesn't matter that chloroplasts, a long time ago, were fully alive. It's kind of like how it doesn't matter that you, a long time ago, were a small child with the promise of being a productive human being. Now, chloroplasts are part of plants and you are a piddling excuse of a man.
If you still don't believe me, consider: while chloroplasts were free-living cyanobacteria millions of years ago, they are now incapable of survival outside of the host cell; additionally, they cannot replicate without the host cell so they are "not actually 'fully' alive" either. Considering that a substantial portion of their DNA is also stored in the nucleus of the plant cell, one must really consider the chloroplast part of the host cell; that is why any biologist will say that chloroplasts are an organelle inside (some) plant cells. The same argument is applied to mitochondria: they are part of animal cells and thus, animal cells are alive. Trying to split the eukaryotic cells from mitochondria (or plant cells from chloroplasts) is like taking the creme filling out of a Twinkie; you can't because both parts are integral to the whole. Neither you nor your liver would survive very long without each other, and the same can be said for eukaryotic cells and mitochondria. (Obviously, this doesn't generalize to other organs as you are living proof that life can be sustained sans brain).
Needless to say, the cyanobacterium itself is not necessarily more efficient at photosynthesis than entire plant cells. For starters, all plant cell structures except for the chloroplasts are basically transparent so all the sunlight absorbed by plant leaves is absorbed in the chlorophyll that is only present in the cytochrome complexes in the chloroplasts. Additionally, plant leaves have other structures that control the environment inside the leaf and let the "cyanobacteria" work better; think of it as how "humans" work play WoW much better in air conditioning than hot sunlight. Normally, the plant-chloroplast relationship would be called symbiotic since the plant provides the chloroplast with otherwise unavailable access to sunlight. However, in this case it's direct human intervention that provides the access to sunlight. it obvious that the plant and chloroplast both benefit from their arrangement, but you are an idiot who styles himself a genius.
Also, can you please explain to me how it is "direct human intervention" that provides chloroplasts with sunlight? I didn't realize that we controlled the fucking sun...or is that because I one of the sheople manipulated by the secret cabal?
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mmmm... twinkie....
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Although I am not a biologist, I do remember reading some relatively new science that describes how the evolutionary trees of prokaryotes and eukaryotes first diverged, but then recombined. Thus, we have living cells that contain the elements of both.
But, I tagged this article with a 'whatcouldpossiblygowrong' tag because of the inevitable u
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I suspect the issue here is that it can be easier to get at something from inside a cyanobacterium than it is to get something from inside a plant cell
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Photosynthesis extracts a whole lot more of the sun's energy per square meter than our best solar panels..
Re:Biofuels are the future. (Score:5, Insightful)
Photosynthesis extracts a whole lot more of the sun's energy per square meter than our best solar panels..
No it doesn't. Most plants only operate at 1-2% photosynthetic efficiency, the most efficient crops maybe at 7%, and the theoretical maximum is 11% [wikipedia.org].
Compare that to solar cells which have 15-20%, in the laboratory even 40% efficiency. The advantage of photosynthesis is not efficiency, but price and resiliency, with the "cells" manufacturing themselves.
Re:Biofuels are the future. (Score:5, Interesting)
You are comparing turning the suns energy into electricity to turning the suns energy into hydrocarbons and then turning that into electricity, and you are discounting the other uses for the hydrocarbons.
Taking carbon out of the air and cracking water into hydrogen and oxygen takes a whole lot of energy and the plants do it better than they can in the lab, when the only energy input is the sun.
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Taking carbon out of the air and cracking water into hydrogen and oxygen takes a whole lot of energy and the plants do it better than they can in the lab, when the only energy input is the sun.
Okay, that may be true, given your constraints. I think it also probably holds for carbon fixation from the atmosphere, by itself. But surely you're not claiming that a plant is more efficient at hydrogen production than a 25% efficient solar cell paired with a 50% efficient electrolysis process. So obviously we know how to do some parts of the process more efficiently already.
And atmospheric carbon fixation is something of a moot point when we have hundreds of years of reserves of carbon that we are alr
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And atmospheric carbon fixation is something of a moot point when we have hundreds of years of reserves of carbon that we are already digging up out of the ground and expelling into the atmosphere as highly concentrated CO2. They will even pay you to take it.
Parent gets to the point. The advantages of plants are: plants provide a service that "They will even pay you" for: pulling waste CO2 out of the atmosphere; plants store solar energy; plants manufacture themselves*; waste oxygen from plants is an essential ingredient to animal life.
Disadvantages: plants are flammable when dry, some have potential to maim when knocked over, some taste icky, the larger ones can be navigation hazards, and many harbor undesirable organisms*.
*Some plants are specially enginee
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Wrong (Score:5, Informative)
No, the 11% max. figure is for just turning sun's energy into hydrocarbons. If you want to generate electricity out of it, like in a bio-mass power plant, the thermodynamic losses would be on top of that so the efficiency would be considerably lower.
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It's all in how you look at it. If we deduct the energy needed to make more solar cells from the figure for PV, (since plants and bacteria use some of their energy for replication), photosynthesis looks pretty good.
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That depends on what kind of PV cells you're using, since they vary greatly in both efficiency and cost. It's true that the up-front cost (both in terms of energy and materials) of PV cells is rather high, however, their 20+ year lifespan tends to amortize the initial investment nicely over time. Whereas if you're producing energy from plants, you have ongoing harvesting, processing, and distribution costs which may be comparable or greater than your initial investment in PV would have been.
I'm not pickin
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I'm not saying PV is bad, or even that plants are better, just that the comparison is more complex than the raw conversion efficiency. Photosynthesis may make a lot of sense in large scale use, but probably isn't even practical for a residential application.
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No it doesn't. Most plants only operate at 1-2% photosynthetic efficiency, the most efficient crops maybe at 7%, and the theoretical maximum is 11% [wikipedia.org].
Compare that to solar cells which have 15-20%, in the laboratory even 40% efficiency. The advantage of photosynthesis is not efficiency, but price and resiliency, with the "cells" manufacturing themselves.
We should also look at the overall efficiency including the end use. Combustion to produce mechanical energy is going to be less efficient tha
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Yeah, but plants have the storage problem well handled. The electricity from your vaunted sand-panels must be used immediately or it is lost. Making hydrocarbons from electricity is far more expensive than making hydrocarbons from hydrocarbons, and the transportation sector will require hydrocarbons as a storage mechanism until electrical batteries can contain the same concentration of stored energy in both weight and volume and charging speed.
Solar panels are great when you don't have to worry about weig
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You might also want a battery which dosn't create more pollution to manufacture and dispose of than a fuel tank.
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Plants are the most efficient at collecting solar energy.
I'm not sure that's the case, but what plants are, is cheap.
-jcr
Never sent roses, have you?
No wonder you never get laid.
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I did, and they were in her favorite color. I didn't know that black roses mean something different though...
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Plants are cheap. Land is not, processing plant material is not, dealing with plant waste and contaminants (some harmful) that can't be part of the fuel is a problem, fertilizer has it;s own environmental issues, water cost more than gas, and would you really truse a fuel shortage due to a bad frost???
Also, this is the exact reason ethanol is bad, gallons per acre per year is about 1% of the total earth's needs if we choose to continue to eat.
Lets try something else:
How about a technology we've used since
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This is REAL, not vaporware. It's accepted simple chemisty, proven over 50 years of use, finally attacked and refined with modern improvements in heat exchangers, electrolizers, and more, plus being combined with wind energy (actually solving one of Wind's biggest issues, off-peak overproduction), and the enture process is carbon nuetral...
If you believe that, I have a really neat water-powered car to sell you ... gets 8,000 miles per gallon, and even comes with an ice-cube dispenser.
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Plants are the most efficient at collecting solar energy.
I would expect in the future some kind of battery cells which directly interface with a massive array of plant-emulating light absorbing complexes which produce a voltage from sunlight.
Though in the Wikipedia I see (see 'photosynthesis') that this process converts light into energy with an efficiency of 3-6%, while solar panels have 6-20%, I believe that it might reach a point where mass production of hybrid organo-metallic devices can be achieved
At the end we will have plants at home which instead of p
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Your point, though I suspect facetious, is quite interesting. I also envision a future where we can harness biological resources to produce energy. The mammalian brain produces megawatts of power over its lifetime. Imagine if we could take advantage of that? In envision a future where hundreds, perhaps thousands, if not millions or biological entities are connected in vast grids to power the world of the future. We could feed these batteries just as we feed chickens and pigs today; namely, just recycle the
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At no point during the life of a mammal does it produce anywhere near 1 MWe.
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I believe that is intentional...
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Your vision somehow reminds me of The Matrix.
Thanks for clearing that up for us.
Water is a scarce resource (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree with you in that, but I don't think cyanobacteria are the only solution for biofuels.
Pond scum needs ponds, and ponds are filled with water. Granted, waste water can be used, these ponds can be part of a sewage treatment system.
I think a future biofuel system will be a more diverse system. We will need bacteria in ponds, but also other plants, such as cactuses or other that grow in semi-desert areas, for instance. Or what about the oceans? Imagine biofuel made from kelp, three quarters of the surface area of Earth are available for that.
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I work upstairs from the ASU cyanobacteria project, and it is meant to be scaleable for the type of semi arid regions that you describe for cactus. Since cyanobacteria have very little vitamin and mineral requirements, they can be grown in large transparent tubes in the Arizona desert, pumped only full of tapwater and air.
Non-extremophile prokaryotic organisms, when given optimal growth conditions, will typically grow faster than most large eukaryotic plants, and in that lies the advantage of cyano over cac
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Do they grow in salt water? Because if they do there is plenty of desert land close enough to the ocean that we can pump as much water as we need.
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So we need to build a long pipeline to pump seawater from the Gulf of California to Arizona and start building oil farms.
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That's what all that ocean biomass is, basically.
This technology just makes it easier to convert into something useful for us.
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Forget plants. Even at 10 times the lab yields, running 365 days a year, there simply isn't enough land. (lat along what to do with the biological wastes).
http://www.dotyenergy./ [www.dotyenergy.] Read everything they have. This is REAL technology that has been in use making Diesel and jetfuels since WWII. Modern improvements (over 60 approved aptents recently), combined with wind poewr, and design improvements for mass scale fuel manufacture make this work at about $60-80 per barrel depending on local markets (roughly
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Given the care and attention that you give to spelling and grammar, I'm not surprised that you're not being paid. In fact, if you're trying to encourage people to read what you're proposing (which doesn't sound an utterly incredible system, though I suspect that it's no where near as good as your summary), then you might find it better to use some writing tools to che
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I appologize for my company who provides me a PC and browser without integrated spell checking... I have little enough time to post on breaks, I don't have time for manual editing.
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This coal burning nonesense was a huge waste of money and lives [wikipedia.org], we should have invested in unproven technology X.
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This coal burning nonesense was a huge waste of money and lives, we should have invested in unproven technology X.
Uh, biofuels are a proven technology; Rudolph Diesel demonstrated his diesel engine at the world's far on peanut oil. Biofuel from algae has been demonstrated already.
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Frank Whittle ran his prototype on castor oil, IIRC.
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Comparatively speaking, the hydrogen economy is the unproven tech. Sure, we know fuel cells work well in spacecraft when maintained by an army of techs who don't care about the cost compared to gasoline, but how about when deployed in passenger cars maintained by people who may or may not have a high school diploma?
Actual production of the hydrogen is a giant hand-wave. Currently we use fossil fuel to produce affordable hydrogen. We have no infrastructure whatsoever that can even be refit to deliver the mas
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With spacecraft reducing weight is of great importance, so much so that they stopped painting the shuttle external tank white after the first few flights. This makes it worthwhile dealing with a difficult to handle fuel.
We have no infrastructure whatsoever that can even be refit to deliver the massive am
Re:Biofuels are the future. (Score:4, Interesting)
Not according to this fellow, who won an Ig Nobel award for his work with bacteria from panda poop, who need to process quite a lot of cellulose in their diet. Hydrogen is the biofuel these bacteria produce.
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20091124p2a00m0na009000c.html [mainichi.jp]
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Thanks a lot for that!
Your mentioning of "panda poop" ready dovetailed nicely with me eating lunch while reading /.
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It really is a big issue, especially when it comes to storing the fuel on the vehicle. You can't pour hydrogen into a gas or diesel tank nor will it go into the wing of a jet airliner. Even though you can probably get all three types of internal combustion engine to run on hydrogen you'd have to redesign the fuel system from scratch. Liquid fuels are just easier to handle.
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BR>With existing fuels a fairly simple tank is needed to store liquid fuel at ambient pressure and temperature. Any kind of hydrogen fuel tank is considerably more complex.
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The organisms in question are cyanobacteria which are about as closely related to plants as your or I am
Plants are the most efficient at storing energy as some form of hydrocarbon. We already have a huge infrastructure to distribute hydrocarbons.
I'm not aware of any plant which uses hydrocarbons for energy storage (or anything else). Plants typically use polysaccharides for this purpose.
This hydrogen nonsense was a huge waste of money,
Not
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You never know which approach is going to have the most commercial potential until you've gone and explored all the available approaches. Funding the ones that don't pan out is not a waste of money. It's part of the process that brings out the ones that do.
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Plants also have a drawback: They need room. Incidentally the room where plants can grow. Plants we eat. There are already countries where people are suffering because areas that used to be used for crop planting are now used to create biofuel (mostly for export).
Hydrogen, being essentially created by electrolytic splitting of water, can be created anywhere where electricity can be produced in quantity and cheaply. Iceland comes to mind, with their geothermal energy they can (and do) create a surplus of ele
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Not necessarily. You can take non-arable land, such as a desert, add sewage waste and bacteria, and VIOLA! biofuel. Or unused coastline, add fast-growing kelp and a lot of sunlight, regular harvests, and, again VOILA! biofuel. Both examples do not detract from current land use, and the coastline kelp forests may attract wildlife. That is not saying that arable land might be used for biofuel production...unless you tightly regulate the production, this will eventually happen if the profit from the sale of bi
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You've been reading Slashdot long enough to know that biofuels are carbon-neutral.
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Probably not. [wikipedia.org] I suppose you could say it is open to debate, but the consensus seems to be for positive energy output with current methods. Also perhaps worth noting is that the parent commented on biofuels in general, whereas you focused in on one particular biofuel from a source that happens to be a bad idea pretty much all the way around. I can see the rationale for using surplus corn for ethanol if you have to use it (the surplus corn).
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Are you a shill for the oil companies?
Ethanol is very net energy positive!
response storm (Score:1)
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How can there be a zombie outbreak? Everyone who is infected will explode from the inside out. It would be quite messy, though!
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Easy pickings for braaaaaaaiinnnss...
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How can there be a zombie outbreak? Everyone who is infected will explode from the inside out. It would be quite messy, though!
Oh, so that's how Boomers appear.
Duh (Score:2, Funny)
Imagine getting ill with these things... (Score:2, Funny)
Just imagine getting infected with bacteria of this kind:
"Good morning, Mr. Phelps. Your illness, should you decide to accept it, will be a nasty flu bug. This bacteria will self-destruct in ten seconds."
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Or infecting pigs with it... thereby making ham and bacon so much easier to harvest.
What's the worse that can happen? (Score:3, Funny)
Have we ever had exploding bacteria before?
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A huge 500-acre vat of this stuff will explode all at once, causing a rift in the time-space continuum that allows Species 8472 to emerge and exact retribution for bursting their cozy bubble.
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A huge 500-acre vat of this stuff will explode all at once, causing a rift in the time-space continuum that allows Species 8472 to emerge and exact retribution for bursting their cozy bubble.
Just as long as Seven-of-Nine shows up to fight them, I'd be okay with that.
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So would I, come to think of it! Bring on our bacterial biofuel overlords, then!
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So then this will be a pretty bad Bellwether for them, I guess, huh?
Re:What's the worse that can happen? (Score:4, Funny)
Have we ever had exploding bacteria before?
Yes, but they don't make a loud bang so most people didn't notice.
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Microbial biofuels could have serious political implications [wikipedia.org]
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They'll explode and die out? This strain doesn't sound like it can sustain itself.
Evolution, suckers.... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd at least suggest seperated smaller tanks of bacteria that are isolated from one another so that the damage of such an event is kept at a minimum.
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Does this make any sense at all? It sounds like complete b
Re:Evolution, suckers.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, the flaw in Niedi's reasoning is that evolution is directed only be better differential reproduction. So, if bacteria reproduce before self-destruction, there will be no environmental pressure to select against this feature.
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It makes some sense. The idea is that whenever you have a lot of bacteria reproducing, mutation rates being what they are, benefitial mutations will eventually appear. Chemostats [wikipedia.org], which are what these reactors will essentially be, have been used to test evolution experimentally in just this way.
Now, the flaw in Niedi's reasoning is that evolution is directed only to better differential reproduction. So, if bacteria reproduce before self-de
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Now, the flaw in Niedi's reasoning is that evolution is directed only to better differential reproduction. So, if bacteria reproduce before self-destruction, there will be no environmental pressure to select against this feature.</quote>
bacteria usually keep on deviding (reproducing) themselves for an extremely long time, so I suppose the self-destructing genes will lead to premature death -> less reproduction in total compared to "normal" bacteria
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At low levels of nutrients they will stop reproducing hence when the solution is saturated of bio-fuel bacteria the self-destruction gene can be triggered and the fuel harvested. This way there
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Not so. Even if bacteria reproduce before self-destruction, if a bacteria that does not self destruct is more fit (even if the fact that it does not self destruct does not contribute to it's fitness) then the "don't self destruct" variant will become dominant.
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As soon as even one or two bacteria manage to throw the phage-genes out again or, even simpler, acquire a loss-of-function mutation they'll have a huge advantage over the self-destructing ones and might eventually eliminate them. The result would be quite nasty for those who run the harvesting plant...
The selective pressure to maintain such a mutation would be in the processing stage where they add the nickel to make them self destruct. You can avoid that by not returning any waste from the processing stage back into the growth tank.
Of course, it's possible that the bacteria without the mutation may out-reproduce the ones with the mutation in the growth tank, but then you'd just start with a fresh batch of your preferred strain.
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And let's just hope that they will not out-reproduce them in the growth-tank, cleaning everything and starting a fresh culture can be a royal pain. Plus it takes some time (thaw them, wait till they recover from the freezing and start reproducing again, wait till you have a sufficient density) which means lost
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Based on the reporting of the article, I don't think that is the case. Mature the pool, divide it into a harvest and a non-harvest, nickle the harvest pool, drain the oil-y goodness + muck, clean, introduce non-harvest pool, wait for population to recover, repeat. Survivors of the nickle-apocalypse are not given a chance to return to the non-harvest population.
This is really cool because (if it can be scaled) neatly solves most of the issues with algal biodiesel. The only remaining problem is separating
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There is a VERY strong evolutionary pressure against the mutants though, those colonies will be disinfected and re-seeded with the non-mutant form.
It won't be a problem for the same reason we don't have a big problem with yeasts and yogurt cultures mutating harmfully.
Re:Evolution, suckers.... (Score:4, Informative)
A loss of function mutation in a yeast used for brewing or a yogurt culture would be a big problem, just not as sensational as a kill the consumer mutation. Yet maintenance and selective breeding of cultures has been manageable for centuries now.
By the time the survival aspect of the modification can come into play, the bacteria are already at a dead end. They are in the batch that is being processed to fuel. The survivors of the nickle treatment will be destroyed just as surely as those that didn't mutate. Yields will be monitored. A tank whose yield declines will be sterilized and re-seeded. Culture sources with poor yields will be destroyed and replaced by others that have bred true (or at least haven't mutated in a way we don't like), just like yeast cultures. Those that produce bad beer are destroyed.
Yes, they mutate a lot. Most of the mutations are a disadvantage. Of the remainder, most don't matter at all. Those that prove harmful to the purpose we culture them for are destroyed batch by batch. The very few that prove beneficial to our purposes are propagated.
In many ways, culturing for fuel production is easier. Unlike foods, we don't care if it has an "off" taste, just that it burns well after processing.
Consider, a brewing yeast that mutates so that it can oxidize alcohol for energy will find plentiful food as the others die out. By the end of the fermentation process they will easily dominate. However, they will produce nasty tasting beer. If the mutation happens in the culture rather than in the vat, the whole culture is discarded.
more details (Score:5, Informative)
Thanks, clearer how it works now (Score:3, Informative)
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Bioethanol [feeddistiller.com] Feed @ Feed Distiller [feeddistiller.com]
Human variant (Score:3, Funny)
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Easy: Open a Maserati dealership
BacteriOphage (Score:3, Informative)
It's properly spelled bacteriophage [wikipedia.org]--which are viruses of bacteria. These viruses make bacteria 'explode' so that newly replicated virions are released into the environment.
Using viruses to produce things (Score:1)
This is something like using a computer virus to develop software.
Linux software. By having it infect Windows programs and cause them to self-destruct.
Leaving behind their rich amounts of data...