http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/va ... 12536.html
In short:
In other words: Petrol from shit-bacteria! The list of chemistry technobabble that I replaced here with the ellipses is long and staggering. I have little clue about the chemical makeup of what we so nonchalantly refer to as petrol (or "gasoline" for you colonials) apart from what I found on Wikipedia and a dim memory of learning about ring-shaped molecules in school. Of the many technobabble items, the one that stands out is the "long-chain alkanes". Wikipedia mentions "cyclic alkanes", which, by it's name, would fit the ring shape I recall. The "long chain" variant isn't mentioned in the wikipedia article, while the cyclic ones are missing from the letter to Nature here linked. Of course, they might use a different, more specific term there (like I said, the list of technobabble is magnificent and intimidating), and it's not entirely likely some professional chemists with careers to consider would dare try and publish a claim like "we can make petrol!", that will attract media attention elsewhere, too, when they can't backup their claim. I don't know how much peer review a letter to Nature gets before publication, but with the reputation of that journal, I suspect it's some, at least.Yong Jun Choi & Sang Yup Lee on nature.com wrote:Although microbial production of diesel has been reported, production of another much in demand transport fuel, petrol (gasoline), has not yet been demonstrated. Here we report the development of platform Escherichia coli strains that are capable of producing ...
Now, the technology to make shit into diesel, even without bacteria, isn't even particularly novel anymore (it's just that it's currently used only with turkey offal rather than shit), Shell is building a pilot plant to make petrol from boring old cellulose. Heck, some dudes in California figured out how to make it from air and water and a little sunlight (literally).
But more is better - the more alternatives to dead dinosaurs there are, the less we will have to depend on a single one once the dead dinosaurs are dead once more. Though this is just another one that might consume valuable food crops to make go juice - unlike the yeast used for making drive-booze, e-coli grows on pretty much anything, right? It's like the Starbucks of the bacteria world or something! I think I recall once hearing or reading something along the lines of "If you are looking at something that isn't sterilized, you're most likely looking at e-coli, also."
This is pretty fucking cool, if you ask me.
