Enzyme Discoveries that Will Fuel the Future
A Europe-wide project involving a consortium of research institutes, universities and industrial partners is looking at ways to turn waste products from processes such as spruce chips from paper making, wheat straw from farming and waste bran from milling into bioethanol. A major constituent of these renewable products is lignocellulose, a complex mixture of carbohydrate molecules bound to lignin, the component that forms the basis of wood. The molecular nature of lignocellulose makes it resistant to the actions of microorganisms that could otherwise convert it to simple sugar molecules needed to make biofuels.
The EU-funded DISCO project is hoping to find species of microorganisms which have evolved the highly specialised ability to break down the resistant lignocellulose material. Libraries of microorganisms are a key resource for the research community; for example, the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BUTE), a partner in the DISCO project, holds a library of over 4000 different microorganisms obtained from a multitude of different sources. From these a number of promising candidates for lignocellulosic enzyme activity havealready been indentified and are being further characterised in the labs of other DISCO project partners.......................................
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