Saturday, September 26, 2009

2G biofuels from non- food crops will replace fossil fuels

2G biofuel sources includes almost all the non- food crops available on earth. Yup! I am talking about the cellulosic biomass, which is considered to be the most abundant biological material present in the planet. Cellulosic biomass is anything and everything such as waste, woody biomass, weeds such as Miscanthus. Many people believe the idea of cellulose based ethanol due to the fact that it used inedible waste products to produce Ethanol and this will even the solve the problems of waste disposal.

Producing cellulosic ethanol is still in its nascency, due to the fact that pretreatment procedures have still not been made economically viable. With the help of Synthetic Biology, 15 new fungal enzyme catalysts have been identified. These enzymes are considered to be stable and can easily digest the cellulosic biomass into sugars at high temperatures. Efforts are on the way to identify more organisms to easily break-down the cellulosic biomass, mostly derived from the waste.


Reference to this link will give you additional details about the recent discovery of a new fungus which which produces myco-diesel from waste. Improvements in Biotechnology, plant genetics and recombinant engineering technology are sure to exploit the biofuel potential from cellulosic biomass in the near future.

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