IGERT Story
UCLA researchers engineer E. coli to produce record-setting amounts of alternative fuel
Description
Researchers at UCLA’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have developed a way to produce normal butanol — often proposed as a “greener” fuel alternative to diesel and gasoline — from bacteria at rates significantly higher than those achieved using current production methods.
The findings, reported online in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology, mark an important advance in the production of normal butanol, or n-butanol, a four-carbon chain alcohol that has been shown to work well with existing energy infrastructure, including in vehicles designed for gasoline, without modifications that would be required with other biofuels.
The UCLA team, led by James C. Liao, UCLA’s Chancellor’s Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, demonstrated success in producing 15 to 30 grams of n-butanol per liter of culture medium using genetically engineered Escherichia coli — a record-setting increase over the typical one to four grams produced per liter in the past.
