New approach to boosting biofuel production
Yeast are commonly used to transform corn and other plant materials into biofuels such as ethanol. However, large concentrations of ethanol can be toxic to yeast, which has limited the production capacity of many yeast strains used in industry. “Toxicity is probably the single most important problem in cost-effective biofuels production,” says Gregory Stephanopoulos, the Willard Henry Dow Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. Now Stephanopoulos and colleagues at MIT and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research have identified a new way to boost yeast tolerance to ethanol by simply altering the composition of the medium in which the yeast are grown. They report the findings, which they believe could have a significant impact on industrial biofuel production, in today’s issue of the journal Science. Ethanol and other alcohols can disrupt yeast cell membranes, eventually killing the cells. The MIT team found that adding potassium and hydroxide ions to the medium in which...