www.checkbiotech.org ; www.raupp.info ; www.czu.cz

Barely a year ago, when President Bush first endorsed biofuels as an answer
to the nations "addiction to oil," scientists already were salivating at
biologically engineering ordinary grasses and trees into full-blown energy
crops, February 2007 by Ian Hoffman.

The likeliest prospects ? poplar, switchgrass and a towering Asian
ornamental grass called miscanthus ? really haven't been bred or genetically
modified for human purposes. They are almost as wild and virginal as
teosinte, that ancient bushy grass that American Indians domesticated into
corn, now the foundation of Western grain, animal feed and lately
alternative fuel.

That grain underwent a "green revolution in the 1960s as selective breeding
and new growing techniques boosted crop yields to six times the tonnage per
acre. As the world's largest scientific organization assembled this week in
San Francisco, researchers talked of bringing the same revolution to bear on
other energy crops, but they've dropped yesteryear's speculation about
plantations of black trees for maximum solar absorption and grasses
genetically inserted with self-devouring enzymes, programmed, in effect,
with the seeds of their own destruction.

The change in message has been driven by the realization that genetically
modified energy crops could be politically controversial and take years to
gain regulatory approval.

"This industry is not going to be built on genetically modified plants.
They're not going to appear within 15 years, biofuels expert

Chris Somerville, chairman of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Plant
Biology at Stanford University, said Friday at the annual meeting of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Instead, many scientists are saving the tools of genetic modification and
synthetic biology for the microbes that are the workhorses of every
biorefinery. Those germs digest plant matter into sugars, then ferment those
sugars into fuels.

For now, the U.S. biofuels industry is built on corn, milled and fermented
by a highly inefficient process into the same kind of alcohol found in
whiskey.

Berkeley researchers say ethanol costs almost as much energy to make as it
delivers, while producing more planet-warming greenhouse gases in many cases
than just burning plain gasoline.

"In the future there will be a variety of new species that have not been
used on a large scale as energy crops, and these species will have different
requirements as inputs than current field crops, said Somerville, who has
been offered the directorship of the new Energy Bioscience Institute funded
by energy giant BP Amoco PLC at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and
the University of California, Berkeley. Those plants regrow year after year,
unlike corn, and need less fertilizer and water, the costliest inputs to
energy crops, Somerville said.

Ordinary grasses and trees are 75 percent sugars by weight, presenting more
mass for conversion to fuel, but also have more complex plant fibers and
more sugars that are more difficult to convert to fuel than simple corn
starch.

That's where the bugs come in.

In the hunt for efficiently destructive bugs, scientists for such companies
as Diversa Corp. are reaching into the stomachs of cows, tapping hot
volcanic vents and hiking deep into Costa Rica's jungles to trap some of the
worlds most ravenous termites. They are finding huge communities of
bacteria, fungi and protozoa work together.

The trick is identifying the best recipe of genes and conditions for
converting plant fibers into sugars or some other fuel precursor.

The U.S. Energy Departments Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek has been
decoding the germs' DNA as part of a project with Diversa and other
companies to identify those genes so they can be cobbled together into
superbugs capable of turning different plant fibers and wastes into fuel.

Pursuit of such "frankenbugs" and new combinations of enzymes is really just
beginning, according to Melvin Simon, a Caltech biology professor and
Diversa board member.

"People are looking like mad, and there are hundreds and hundreds of these
genes," Simon said at the annual meeting of the American Society for the
Advancement of Science. "Nobody as far as I know can think of a superbug
that can eat your table."

The potential gains in efficiency for the conversion of plant and waste mass
into ethanol or other fuels are enormous, said Eddy Rubin, director of the
Joint Genome Institute.

"Right now were where we were with the Human Genome Project 15 years ago.
It's very inefficient and very costly," he said. "There's a lot of
low-hanging fruit that will make things two times, three times and 10 times
less in cost."

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