Red Seaweed to be a Viable Source of Biofuel

A Metabolic Engineer with the University of Illinois, Yong-Su Jin, who is also a faculty member in the Genomic Biology department and a Microbial genomics Assistant Professor, has unequivocally given a positive reply to the question if red seaweed was a viable source of biofuel. He has crafted a strain of yeast that could easily ferment galactose.

Normally, when biofuel crops are talked about Americans think only about switchgrass, corn or miscanthus. But in peninsular nations or small islands the choice would be marine biomass. He mentioned that biofuels when produced from terrestrial biomass crops put the producers in difficulties as the recalcitrant fibers are difficult to break down to extract fermentable sugars. They need extremely harsh pretreatment procedures to release the sugars, and this leads to a number of toxic byproducts, which would also inhibit microbial fermentation subsequently. But marine biomass could be easily converted to fermentable sugars with much higher production rates and distribution ranges when compared to terrestrial biomass.

But the major impediment to making biofuels from red seaweed were the facts that degrading process produces both galactose and glucose and that galactose could not be easily fermented. Jin and his fellow scientists have in recent times recognized three genes in the microbe Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which is normally used in the fermentation process. Overexpression of one gene in these microbes improved the fermentation of galactose by 250% when compared to a control strain. Jin commented that this discovery significantly enhances the economic viability of marine biofuels. The overexpression of one specific gene, which is a truncated version of the TUP1 gene, increased the fermentation of galactose. The new strain fermented both glucose and galactose sugars three times speedily than the control strain, taking 8 hours when compared to the 24 hours for the control strain.

He further mentioned that when the protein was targeted, the metabolic enzymes in galactose became activated. According to him, galactose was available copiously  in marine biomass and hence this enhanced fermentation process will benefit the seaweed industry. Marine biomass is an advantageous renewable source mainly because of its high yields when compared to terrestrial biomass; its easy depolymerizing abilities as it does not have any cellulose crystalline or recalcitrant lignin structures; and higher rates of carbon dioxide fixation making it an attractive option for recycling CO₂ and sequestration processes.