Seaweed as biofuel? Metabolic engineering makes it a viable option
Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - 21:30
in Biology & Nature
Is red seaweed a viable future biofuel? Now that a metabolic engineer has developed a strain of yeast that can make short work of fermenting galactose, the answer is an unequivocal yes. Researchers have recently identified three genes in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the microbe most often used to ferment the sugars, whose overexpression increased galactose fermentation by 250 percent when compared to a control strain.