Do volcanoes act as their very own early warning system?

A BLAST from the past has left tantalising hints that volcanic eruptions could be predicted decades in advance.

Volcanoes can signal their intent to erupt days or months ahead of time, giving authorities a chance to evacuate the area. Now evidence of the events leading up to a Bronze Age eruption suggests it might be possible to extend that warning period.

The Santorini volcano in the Greek islands lay dormant for 18,000 years before blowing its top some 3500 years ago, perhaps contributing to the demise of the Minoan civilisation. A close look at the pumices produced in the eruption shows that Santorini woke up around 100 years earlier.

Timothy Druitt of Blaise Pascal University in Clermont-Ferrand, France, and colleagues say that the crystals in the rocks have a structure and chemistry that only makes sense if they formed from magma that flooded into the magma chamber for a century before the eruption.

In theory, seismic monitoring can spot signs that magma is gushing into the magma chambers of dormant volcanoes, including supervolcanoes like Yellowstone, warning of an eruption in the decades ahead.—Newscientist.com

An artist's depiction of GJ 667Cc orbiting a red dwarf, with its binary companion stars in the distance.

A new planet, probably a rocky super-Earth has been found squarely within its star’s habitable zone, making it one of the best candidates yet to support life, its discoverers say.

The planet, dubbed GJ 667Cc, orbits a red dwarf star 22 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Scorpio. Binary pair of orange dwarf stars are part of the same system.

The new planet has a mass 4.5 times that of Earth and orbits its host star every 28 days.

The red dwarf is relatively dim, so the planet receives slightly less light from its star than Earth does from the sun. But most of the star’s light is infrared, so the planet should absorb more of its incoming energy than Earth does from sunlight.

That means if the planet has a rocky surface which is predicted for planets less than ten times Earth’s mass and an atmosphere, it could support liquid water and maybe life, said co-discoverer Guillem Anglada-Escudé, who conducted the work while at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C.

“If it has an atmosphere, it’s probably reddish all the time, because the star is really red,” Anglada-Escudé said. “It would be like being evening all the time.”

For any hypothetical observers on the surface, the binary stars in the distance would be “very prominent in the sky and it would be an exotic thing.”

Anglada-Escudé and colleagues found the new planet using public data from the European Southern Observatory, which hosts telescopes that can measure wobbles in a star’s orbit caused by a planet’s gravitational tug.

The new super-Earth was somewhat unexpected, because some planetary-formation models say that metal-poor stars such as GJ 667C shouldn’t have terrestrial planets around them.

In stellar terms, metals are elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. Such heavy atoms—including carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen—are the “building blocks” for rocky planets. If a young star has fewer metals, the theory goes, so does its disk of planet-forming debris.

Still, the results might not be that surprising, said Aki Roberge of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who wasn’t part of the study team.

“We know it’s more likely to have a gas giant planet around a metal-rich star, but we don’t really know if that holds to [lower mass, rocky planets], because we haven’t found enough of them yet,” Roberge said.

But smaller objects, such as asteroids and comets, have been found around low-metal stars, so “there doesn’t appear to be any favorability for being a low- or high-metallicity star,” she said.

For metal-poor stars, “maybe it’s easier to form smaller things, [like] small rocky bodies, [than] to form a massive giant planet.”

Study co-author Anglada-Escudé, who is now a postdoc at the University of Gottingen in Germany, would like to eventually confirm that GJ 667Cc is in fact a potentially habitable super-Earth.

That would require a transit observation, when astronomers measure the dimming of the host star’s light as the planet passes in front of the star, as seen from Earth.

Transit data can help astronomers determine a planet’s density—and thus its composition—and possibly observe its atmospheric characteristics.

With our current view of the red dwarf, a transit of GJ 667Cc has about a one-percent chance of happening, he said.

But so far, planets outside our solar system have been discovered in so many different configurations that it’s possible GJ 667Cc is the first of many super-Earths orbiting metal-poor stars, Anglada-Escudé said.

“What we expect with new instruments coming online is we can find 20 or 30 of these objects” in the near future, he said. “So within two or three years, one of them has to transit.”—News.nationalgeographic.com

Large mammals such as the black rhino take longer to evolve than do small mammals.

Some mammals need roughly 24 million generations to go from mouse-size to elephant-size, a new study says.

Using both fossil and living specimens, scientists calculated growth rates for 28 different mammalian groups during the past 65 million years—and found that, for mammals, getting big takes longer than shrinking.

It takes a minimum of 1.6 million generations for mammals to achieve a hundredfold increase in body size, about 5 million generations for a thousandfold increase, and about 10 million generations for a 5,000-fold increase, the team discovered.

For land mammals, odd-toed ungulates—such as horses and rhinos—displayed the fastest maximum rates. Curiously, primates showed the slowest rates among the mammals examined.

“It’s a bit of a mystery,” said study leader Alistair Evans, an evolutionary biologist at Australia’s Monash University.

“It’s a lot harder to make a big primate than it is to make a big rhino or elephant … There could be many reasons for this, but staying a primate and getting big seems to be very difficult.”

Among all mammals, cetaceans—the group that includes whales and dolphins—experienced the highest rate of body inflation, requiring only about three million generations for a thousandfold size increase.

Evans and his team speculate that difference is likely because their body weight is supported by water, which makes growing larger less challenging than on land.

That’s because there are fewer constraints on a marine mammal evolving bigger. For instance, without the buoyancy of water, a whale’s internal organs would be crushed by its own weight.

The study also found that mammals shrink up to 30 times faster than they increase.

“That’s quite amazing that there’d be such a difference in the rate of decreasing in size compared to increasing,” said Evans.

There could be two main reasons for the fast shrinkage, the team says. First, increasing body size requires a lot of skeletal and muscular changes to support and move the increased weight, said study co-author James Brown of the University of New Mexico.

“As an organism gets bigger, they run up against different design constraints,” Brown said.

“Dealing with those problems requires innovation. It requires new genes and new ways of reading the developmental program.”

Secondly, Evans said, all mammals, regardless of their sizes, must grow from a single cell and go through a developmental phase when they are small. So, to shrink, all a mammal species has to do is cease development earlier.

“You’re stopping the developmental program earlier, instead of trying to extend it,” Evans said.

David Polly, a paleontologist at Indiana University, said the new study is one of the most comprehensive investigations to date of mammal body-size evolution.

“Measuring rates of evolution using fossils is a laborious task,” said Polly, who was not involved in the study. “So while people have studied rates of evolution, it’s usually on a pretty specific group of animals.”

Polly added that the new findings also seem to confirm what many scientists suspected: Evolution of very large body sizes requires much more time than past studies had indicated. Previous research had focused on body-size changes of individual species over short geological time periods.

Evans and colleagues suspect their findings might also apply to other animal groups, such as dinosaurs.

“We have actually started looking into dinosaurs, but the difficulty with them,” he said, is that it’s unknown how long a dinosaur’s generation lasted.—News.nationalgeographic.com

The Paranal Observatory is located 2,635m above sea level

Astronomers have created the world’s largest virtual optical telescope, linking four telescopes in Chile so that they operate as a single device.

The telescopes of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the Paranal Observatory form a virtual mirror of 130m (424ft) in diameter.

A previous attempt to link the telescopes last March failed.

Thursday’s link-up was the system’s scientific verification – the final step before scientific work starts.

Linking all four units of the VLT will give scientists a much more detailed look at the Universe than previous experiments using just two or three telescopes to create a virtual mirror.

The process that links separate telescopes together is known as interferometry.

In this mode, the VLT becomes the biggest ground-based optical telescope on Earth.

Besides creating a gigantic virtual mirror, interferometry also greatly improves the telescope’s spatial resolution and zooming capabilities.

The VLT is one of several telescopes in the Atacama Desert set up by the European Southern Observatory (Eso).

Eso is an international research organisation headquartered in Munich, Germany, and sponsored by 15 member countries.

Even prior to the start of the operation, as the domes of the four VLT units opened on the desert mountaintop, excitement filled the Paranal Observatory’s tiny control room.

It was going to be a special night, said one of the astronomers.

The head of instrumentation at Paranal, Frederic Gonte, called the event a “milestone in our quest for uncovering secrets of the Universe”.

“It’s an extremely important step because now we know that we’re ready to do real science,” he told BBC News.

“From now on, we’ll be able to observe things we were not able to observe before.”

To link the VLT units, the team of international astronomers and engineers used an instrument called Pionier, which replaces a multitude of mirrors with a single optical microchip.

Although the first attempt to combine the four telescopes occurred in March 2011, it did not really work, said Jean-Philippe Berger, a French astronomer involved in the project.

But this time, it was already pretty clear that all the instruments were working correctly, he added.

“Last time, the atmospheric conditions and vibrations in the system were so bad that the data was just worthless,” he recalled. “We stopped after half an hour knowing that it wouldn’t improve.

“So, this attempt is the real first one to carry out observations for several hours straight to test the system in different conditions.”

From now on, the system will be offered to the astronomical community, he added – any astronomer working at Paranal or visiting the observatory will be able to use it.

VLTI, or the VLT Interferometer, has been used since 2002 to link together up to three VLT telescopes, as well as four small auxiliary telescopes that reside beside the big ones on the same platform at Cerra Paranal mountain, at 2,635m altitude.

The main component of an optical telescope is a mirror, and the light coming from a particular object being observed with separate telescopes – such as a star, a nebula or a galaxy – first gets reflected off individual mirrors.

And this is where the interferometer comes into play.

It directs the light underground into tunnels, where specific instruments compensate for the delay that inevitably exists when more than one telescope is used.

Once there is no delay, the light is combined into a single beam – and the image astronomers get is what would have been produced by one telescope with a gigantic mirror and a much better zoom.

In the case of the VLT, the zooming capability becomes almost 20 times better, said Mr Berger.

He explained that although the biggest “virtual” mirror of 130m in diameter has already been achieved by linking the two telescopes farthest from each other at Paranal, using all four units gives astronomers several advantages.

“The more telescopes the better – you want to generate a plane to fill that virtual mirror, to increase the efficiency to reconstruct an image, in order to observe more complex objects in the sky,” he said.

“With two telescopes, you typically observe round stars, for which you’re only interested in the diameter, or binary stars, where you can measure the separation between the two stars.

“With four telescopes, you can start thinking about triple stars or young stars surrounded by a protoplanetary disc – a disc of dust and gas that forms planets.”

“Now, the zoo of objects accessible to us will be much bigger.”—BBC

The research, published in the British medical journal the Lancet, suggests 1.24 million people died from the mosquito-borne disease in 2010.

This compares to a World Health Organisation (WHO) estimate for 2010 of 655,000 deaths.

But both the new study and the WHO indicate global death rates are now falling.

The research was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It used new data and new computer modelling to build a historical database for malaria between 1980 and 2010.

The conclusion was that worldwide deaths had risen from 995,000 in 1980 to a peak of 1.82 million in 2004, before falling to 1.24 million in 2010.

The rise in malaria deaths up to 2004 is attributed to a growth in populations at risk of malaria, while the decline since 2004 is attributed to “a rapid scaling up of malaria control in Africa”, supported by international donors.

While most deaths were among young children and in Africa, the researchers noted a higher proportion of deaths among older children and adults than previously estimated. In total, 433,000 more deaths occurred among children over five and adults in 2010 than in the WHO estimate.

“You learn in medical school that people exposed to malaria as children develop immunity and rarely die from malaria as adults,” said Dr. Christopher Murray of the University of Washington in Seattle, who led the study.

“What we have found in hospital records, death records, surveys and other sources shows that just is not the case.”

The researchers also concluded malaria eradication was not a possibility in the short-term.

“We estimated that if decreases from the peak year of 2004 continue, malaria mortality will decrease to less than 100,000 deaths only after 2020,” they write.

The Lancet’s editor, Richard Horton, told the BBC: “Right now we don’t actually have any reliable primary numbers for malaria deaths in some of the most malarious regions of the world, so what numbers we have come from estimates.

“What this paper reports is a new way of estimating the number of malaria deaths, where they’ve used additional data sets and improved mathematical models from calculating mortality.”

But despite what he calls the “disturbing” number of deaths recorded, he believes the underlying message of the report is that the disease can and is being controlled.

“Since 2004, the number of malaria deaths has dropped by about a third, and that’s really been the time when the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria has swung into action” he said.

“Over the past decade, 230 million cases of malaria have been treated and the same number of bed nets have been distributed to people at risk of malaria, and the result of that has been this huge downturn. So what we know is that we’re actually able to turn off malaria with our existing interventions.”—BBC

Concentrations of microplastic were greatest near coastal urban areas, the study showed

Microscopic plastic debris from washing clothes is accumulating in the marine environment and could be entering the food chain, a study has warned.

Researchers traced the “microplastic” back to synthetic clothes, which released up to 1,900 tiny fibres per garment every time they were washed.

Earlier research showed plastic smaller than 1mm were being eaten by animals and getting into the food chain.

The findings appeared in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

“Research we had done before… showed that when we looked at all the bits of plastic in the environment, about 80% was made up from smaller bits of plastic,” said co-author Mark Browne, an ecologist now based at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“This really led us to the idea of what sorts of plastic are there and where did they come from.”

Dr. Browne, a member of the US-based research network National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, said the tiny plastic was a concern because evidence showed that it was making its way into the food chain.

“Once the plastics had been eaten, it transferred from [the animals'] stomachs to their circulation system and actually accumulated in their cells,” he told BBC News.

In order to identify how widespread the presence of microplastic was on shorelines, the team took samples from 18 beaches around the globe, including the UK, India and Singapore.

“We found that there was no sample from around the world that did not contain pieces of microplastic.”

Dr Browne added: “Most of the plastic seemed to be fibrous.

“When we looked at the different types of polymers we were finding, we were finding that polyester, acrylic and polyamides (nylon) were the major ones that we were finding.”

The data also showed that the concentration of microplastic was greatest in areas near large urban centres.

In order to test the idea that sewerage discharges were the source of the plastic discharges, the team worked with a local authority in New South Wales, Australia.

“We found exactly the same proportion of plastics,” Dr. Browne revealed, which led the team to conclude that their suspicions had been correct.

As a result, Dr. Browne his colleague Professor Richard Thompson from the University of Plymouth, UK carried out a number of experiments to see what fibres were contained in the water discharge from washing machines.

“We were quite surprised. Some polyester garments released more than 1,900 fibres per garment, per wash,” Dr. Browne observed.

“It may not sound like an awful lot, but if that is from a single item from a single wash, it shows how things can build up.

“It suggests to us that a large proportion of the fibres we were finding in the environment, in the strongest evidence yet, was derived from the sewerage as a consequence from washing clothes.”—ESPN

Environmentalist and Chairman of the Captain Planet Foundation, Laura Turner, will pay a visit to Ghana this February.

The daughter of Ted Turner, Mrs. Turner-Seydel, is the recipient of numerous humanitarian and environmental awards.

She will be accompanied by Barbara Pyle, co-creator of the award-winning 1990s animation series, Captain Planet, founder of the Captain Planet Foundation and lately, the environmental movement The Planeteers.

They are visiting Ghana as guests of the Rotary Club of Accra Airport and Global Media Alliance.

They will participate in a series of humanitarian and environmental activities and events scheduled to take place in the country from the 1stto the 5th of February, 2012.

Mrs. Seydel will assist in the launching of the Accra Airport Rotary Club Foundation.

The foundation will serve as the action arm for Rotary Club of Accra Airport’s service to their community.

Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Rotary Club of Accra Airport Foundation, Mr. Kwesi Atuah, expressed delight at having Laura Turner-Seydel as guest speaker for the occasion and remarked that “considering her role in humanitarian efforts, it is only fit for Laura to address such a memorable occasion for the Rotary Club of Accra Airport, Ghana and International.”

He added that the launch will also witness a fund-raiser to help raise funds for the club’s on-going projects, and also to initiate and pursue other life-enhancing projects.

The Rotary Club of Accra Airport, which turned ten years last year, has embarked on several life-touching projects including eye screening tests and treatment for some 200 cataract and glaucoma patients.

…As Ghana Planeteer Movement gears up to host duo

The Ghana Planeteer Movement, the local chapter of the Captain Planet Foundation, will host two top US environmentalists, Laura Seydel-Turner, Chairperson of the Captain Planet Foundation, and Barbara Pyle, founder of the foundation. 

They would participate in a series of activities scheduled from the 1st to the 5th of February.

While in Ghana on their five-day visit, Laura Turner and Barbara Pyle will pay a courtesy call on the U.S Ambassador to Ghana, the Minister of Environment, as well as the Mayor of Accra and some environmental institutions, together with members of the Planeteer Movement of Ghana.

President of the Ghana Planeteer Movement, Timothy Karikari, notes that Laura and Barbara’s visit is a boost for the group.

“Having our founder and chairperson visit us is a motivation to our relatively young movement to do much more. We would have the opportunity to interact with them and learn a lot to improve our approach towards environmental advocacy and action in Ghana”, he said.

Launched in October 2010 by Laura Turner-Seydel, together with Executive Chairman of Global Media Alliance, Edward Boateng, and Osagyefo Amoatia Ofori Panin II, Omanhene of the Akyem Abuakwa State, the Planeteer Movement of Ghana have been active advocates in environmental issues, putting thought and word to action and embarking on series of educational campaigns in schools as well as hands-on clean up exercises.

Laura Seydel-Turner, daughter of Ted Turner, founder of CNN is the winner of several environmental and humanitarian awards including the League of Conservation Voters Environmental Hero Award, and the Healthy Child Healthy World’s 2010 Mom on a Mission for Service Award.

Barbara Pyle is co-creator of the award-winning 1990s animation series, Captain Planet, founder of the Captain Planet Foundation and lately, the environmental movement The Planeteers.

extinct grizzled langur rediscovered

A Miller’s grizzled langur pauses while drinking water from a mineral spring, or sepan, in 2011. Feared extinct, the monkey species has been “rediscovered” on the Indonesian island of Borneo, a new study says.

Scientists stumbled onto several of the primates last year during a biodiversity survey of the Wehea Forest, a 98,000-acre (40,000-hectare) habitat inIndonesia’s East Kalimantan Province (map). Previously known to live only in a small area along East Kalimantan’s central coast, the Wehea discovery extends the species’ range.

Numbers of the 13-pound (6-kilogram) langur—known for its white, bristly beard and sideburns—had declined in the animal’s coastal habitat due to deforestation, hunting, and large human-caused fires in the 1990s. Later surveys turned up no evidence of the monkey.

“I’ve been working [in Wehea] for four years—I study primates, and I’ve never seen it” until now, said study co-author Stephanie Spehar, a primatologist at the University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh. “The fact we found it did come as a big surprise to all of us.”

Particularly exciting was that an independent survey team led by study co-author Brent Loken of Ethical Expeditions simultaneously spotted the langurs in another part of the forest. This suggests there are at least two healthy populations and not just an isolated group, said Spehar, whose study appears this month in the American Journal of Primatology.

“We were thrilled when we met up and showed each other our photos,” she said.—Christine Dell’Amore

Photograph courtesy Eric Fell

Robert Bindschadler in Antarctica

“This could have a significant impact on global sea-level rise over the coming century.”

Satellite measurements have shown this area is losing ice and surrounding glaciers are thinning, raising the possibility the ice could flow quickly out to sea.

To investigate this possibility, an international team of researchers funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation will travel to Pine Island Glacier next month.

The multidisciplinary group of 13 scientists, led by Robert Bindschadler, emeritus glaciologist of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, will depart from the McMurdo Station in Antarctica in mid-December. They plan to conduct research on the ice shelf for six weeks.

During their stay, they will use a combination of traditional tools and new oceanographic instruments to measure the shape of the cavity underneath the ice shelf and determine how streams of warm ocean water enter it, move toward the bottom of the glacier and melt its underbelly.

In January 2008, Bindschadler was the first person to visit the area as part of initial reconnaissance for the expedition. Scientists had doubted it was even possible to reach the crevasse-ridden ice shelf. Bindschadler used satellite imagery to identify an area where helicopters could land safely to transport scientists and instrumentation to and from the ice shelf.

“The Pine Island Glacier ice shelf continues to be the place where the action is taking place in Antarctica,” Bindschadler said. “It only can be understood by making direct measurements, which is hard to do. We’re doing this hard science because it has to be done. The question of how and why it is melting is even more urgent than it was when we first proposed the project over five years ago.”

The team will use a hot water drill to make a hole through the ice shelf. After the drill hits the ocean, the scientists will send a camera down into the cavity to observe the underside of the ice shelf and analyze the seabed lying approximately 1,640 feet (500 meters) below the ice.

Next, the team will lower into the hole an instrument package provided by oceanographer Tim Stanton of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

The primary instrument, called a profiler, will move up and down a cable attached to the seabed, measuring temperature, salinity and currents from 10 feet (three meters) below the ice to just above the seabed.

A second hole will support a similar instrument array fixed to a pole stuck to the underside of the ice shelf. This instrument will measure how ice and water exchange heat.

The team also will insert a string of 16 temperature sensors in the lowermost ice to freeze inside and become part of the ice shelf. The sensors will measure how fast heat is transmitted upward through the ice when hot flushes of water enter the ocean cavity.

Sridhar Anandakrishnan, a geophysicist with Pennsylvania State University, will study the shape of the ocean cavity and the properties of the bedrock under the Pine Island Glacier ice shelf. He will generate waves of energy by detonating small explosions and banging the ice with instruments resembling sledgehammers. Measurements will be taken in about three dozen places, using helicopters to move from one place to another.

Scientists already have determined the interaction of winds, water and ice is driving ice loss from the floating glacier.

Gusts of increasingly stronger westerly winds push cold surface waters away from the continent, allowing warmer waters that normally hover at depths below the continental shelf to rise.

The upwelling warm waters spill over the border of the shelf and move along the sea floor, back to where the glacier rises from the bedrock and floats, causing it to melt.

The warm salty waters and fresh glacier melt water combine to make a lighter mixture that rises along the underside of the ice shelf and moves back to the open ocean, melting more ice on its way.

How much more ice melts is what the team wants to find out, so scientists can improve projections of how the glacier will melt and contribute to sea-level rise.—Ens-newswire.com

E coli bacteria

Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute have engineered the first strains of Escherichia coli bacteria to produce fuel substitute or precursor molecules suitable for gasoline, diesel and jet fuel.

While this is not the first demonstration of E. coli producing gasoline and diesel from sugars, it is the first demonstration of E. coli producing all three forms of transportation fuels.

And, it was done, without any help from enzyme additives, using switchgrass, which is among the most promising of the potential feedstocks for advanced biofuels.

“This work shows that we can reduce one of the most expensive parts of the biofuel production process, the addition of enzymes to depolymerize cellulose and hemicellulose into fermentable sugars,” says head of the Joint BioEnergy Institute and leader of this research, Jay Keasling.

“This will enable us to reduce fuel production costs by consolidating two steps – depolymerizing cellulose and hemicellulose into sugars, and fermenting the sugars into fuels – into a single step or one pot operation,” explained Keasling.

Keasling, who also holds appointments with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkley, is the corresponding author of a paper in the current issue of the journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” that describes this work.

Advanced biofuels made from the lignocellulosic biomass of non-food crops and agricultural wastes are widely believed to represent the best source of renewable liquid transportation fuels.

Unlike ethanol, which in the United States is produced from corn starch, these advanced biofuels can replace gasoline on a gallon-for-gallon basis, and they can be used in today’s engines and infrastructures.

The biggest problem in commercializing biofuels has been bringing down the cost of producing these fuels so that they are economically competitive with petroleum products.

Unlike the simple sugars in corn grain, the cellulose and hemicellulose in plant biomass are difficult to extract in part because they are embedded in a tough woody material called lignin.

Once extracted, these complex sugars must first be converted or hydrolyzed into simple sugars and then synthesized into fuels.

At the Joint BioEnergy Institute, one approach has been to first pre-treat the biomass with the ionic liquid, molten salt, to dissolve it. Then the scientists engineered a single microorganism that can both digest the dissolved biomass and produce hydrocarbons that have the properties of petrochemical fuels.

“The magic is in the ionic liquid pre-treatment,” says Gregory Bokinsky, a post-doctoral researcher with JBEI’s synthetic biology group and lead author of the paper.

“I suspect you could use ionic liquid pre-treatment on any plant biomass and make it readily digestible by microbes,” Bokinsky said. “For us it was the combination of biomass from the ionic liquid pretreatment with the engineered E. coli that enabled our success.”

E. coli bacteria normally cannot grow on switchgrass, but JBEI researchers engineered strains of the bacteria to express several enzymes that enable them to digest cellulose and hemicellulose and use one or the other for growth.

These strains of E. coli, which can be combined as co-cultures on a sample of switchgrass, were further engineered with three metabolic pathways that enabled the bacteria to produce fuel substitute or precursor molecules suitable for gasoline, diesel and jet engines.

The techniques used in this switchgrass demonstration can be readily adapted to other microbes, the researchers say, opening the door to the production of advanced biofuels from feedstocks that are ecologically and economically appropriate to grow and harvest anywhere in the world.—Ens-newswire.com