Photo: Wikimedia
Shipworms are quite odd sea living creatures to start with. First of all, they’re not actually worms, but mollusks and they feed on wood, hence their name coming from eating their way through the wind-powered ships of the past. But it is this very process that could teach us how to create biofuels more efficiently out of cellulose, as scientists discovered recently.
The study led by Daniel Distel, director of the Ocean Genome Legacy Center of New England Biolabs at Northeastern University, shows shipworms have a unique way of digestion, relying on bacteria living in their gills.
You see, in normal creatures, bacteria lives in the guts where they release digestive enzymes needed to break food down into nutrients needed by the organism. The shipworm on the other hand has bacteria living in its gills, which produce enzymes so strong they survive the trip to the guts.
Don’t just think we’re going to stop using fossil fuels only to start chopping down trees and convert them into biofuel. No, we could use the shipworm’s food decomposing process to replicate it at a large scale and tap on fuel sources like crop waste or scrap wood coming out of furniture factories.
As Distel explained, if the scientists discover how to break cellulose down in to component sugars, there’s just one single step from there to creating ethanol out of things the industry was discarding so far.
Ethanol is a green alternative to gasoline and can be currently obtained from crops like sugar cane and corn. Still, the process is quite inefficient as we still rely on fossil fuels to harvest the plants and it’s also a bad thing for the people’s food stock.
You see, in normal creatures, bacteria lives in the guts where they release digestive enzymes needed to break food down into nutrients needed by the organism. The shipworm on the other hand has bacteria living in its gills, which produce enzymes so strong they survive the trip to the guts.
And it’s that enzyme scientists want to replicate
The benefit coming out form this story is that the shipworms’ enzymes are capable to digest cellulose, the backbone substance in plant materials, which is also the strongest out there in the vegetal world. And we quite need that to make ethanol.Don’t just think we’re going to stop using fossil fuels only to start chopping down trees and convert them into biofuel. No, we could use the shipworm’s food decomposing process to replicate it at a large scale and tap on fuel sources like crop waste or scrap wood coming out of furniture factories.
As Distel explained, if the scientists discover how to break cellulose down in to component sugars, there’s just one single step from there to creating ethanol out of things the industry was discarding so far.
Ethanol is a green alternative to gasoline and can be currently obtained from crops like sugar cane and corn. Still, the process is quite inefficient as we still rely on fossil fuels to harvest the plants and it’s also a bad thing for the people’s food stock.
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