Scientists turn to plants for energy

WALNUT CREEK — After years of decoding the DNA of humans and lab animals, scientists are delving back into plants and microorganisms where DNA sequencing started to plagiarize nature's secrets for making energy and getting rid of pollutants. In millions of years of natural selection, germs and plants have amassed a trove of biochemical methods vastly outnumbering those invented by humans. Scientists now are deciphering the natural world's recipes, armed with powerful new gene-sequencing tools. "The bottom line is nature's solved the energy problem," said MIT oceanographer and microbiologist Ed Delong. "Photosynthesis is the ability to split water with light. If we could do that, the energy problem would be over." Leading experts on termites, energy crops and bacteria that thrive on toxic metals are gathered this week in Walnut Creek, home to the U.S. Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute, to talk about their detective work. The institute is both research center and a factory for digitally identifying the genetic code that serves as the software for all living things. Its banks of sequencing machines and computers can lay bare the recipe book for any organism in a matter of days to months. In the last two years, more than 85 percent of the institute's research has been focused on organisms linked to new biological energy sources, removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere or detection and cleanup of environmental toxins. "I think more and more, we'll be into bio-energy," said JGI director Eddy Rubin. That focus, he said, could drastically boost the efficient production of biofuels such as ethanol to replace imported gasoline. "Corn and wheat just could never be grown at the levels needed to feed people today, but we've done enormous things to them," he said. "The cereal you eat is just nothing like what grows in nature and on bio-energy, I think the changes will be as dramatic. I think this is a field that will move very fast." Jerry Tuskan imagines 40 million acres of poplar trees unlike any on the planet. Rather than sporting tall, sweeping canopies with thick branches, the poplars on these energy plantations would look like a woman's cylindrical hairbrush — 20 feet tall, but 20 inches thick with tiny branches. That's how the tree would be structured to maximize its storage of carbon dioxide and usefulness as a source of biofuels once harvested, chipped and digested by enzymes. A huge tree family including cottonwoods and aspens that grows from Alaska to Baja, poplars are a leading candidate as a feedstock for biofuel production. Armed with the tree's genetic recipe, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientist was ready to begin tailoring saplings for the new energy future when the Bush administration eliminated the budget for woody biofuels. The president now is proposing to restore that funding. If Tuskan and other scientists succeed, biofuels from the poplar, switchgrass and other crops could supply 10-15 percent of the nation's transportation fuels in as little as 15 years. "It's a great time to be in biology outside of even the energy issue," he said. "We're going to see incredible results and really for the first time understand plant growth. What happens beyond that is only limited by the imagination." Earlier generations of microbiologists had to nurture germs in the laboratory to study them, but most of the microbial world defies rearing out of the wild and remained a mystery. But techniques perfected during the human genome project for decoding multiple organisms or individuals simultaneously, known as shotgun sequencing, is allowing scientists to decode thousands of genes' worth of DNA from soil and water without rearing the living organisms. Mike Knotek, a science and technology consultant to the Energy Department and its laboratories, said the sequencing techniques at the Joint Genome Institute are "a godsend to these people, right now, today." "It allows you to go in and look at what nature's learned to do, grab the things that look interesting and study them," he said. "You don't even have to have the organisms. That's a huge sea change for biology." "Source":[ http://www.insidebayarea.com/search/ci_3665465].

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