When you think of e-coli you usually think of under-cooked or raw beef. When you think of biodiesel you think about eco-freaks filling their cars up with used cooking oil they get from a fast food joint. Combine the two and you get a better way to synthesize simple cheap sugar to the point where it has the same chemical components of gasoline. In short, e-coli could make sugar into fuel. Pretty darn cool.
Biodiesel is usually made from animal fat or plant oil, hence the whole cooking oil=fuel thing. Stanford scientists thought, hmmmm, what about sugar? After that they thought, how can we make sugar in to biodiesel and the obvious answer was e-coli of course (not really, they had to research and stuff).
The scientists are tinkering with e-coli and its elements to see what it’s capable of. They are trying to figure out if e-coli has the ability to turn sugar into oil; if so they want to know the limits of this process. E-coli has the natural ability to break down sugar into a fuel-like substance, but everything must be precise. It’s like your favorite team winning a game, or a soufflé rising properly in the oven.
If the scientists can figure how to tinker with the cellular means of production in e-coli and make the sugar into fuel in a cheap manner, then cutting down on the use of fossil fuels could be more realistic. As of now the use of ethanol is more prevalent in achieving that goal. That’s great in one manner, but the use of ethanol as fuel may take up more than half of the country’s corn crop next year. That means there is competition between fuel and food. That means the price of cereal, meat and eggs could be driven up. So the idea of turning sugar into fuel might not be such a bad idea; it might even be a very sweet idea.
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