On 28/09/2008, at 12:11 AM, Dan M wrote: >> Would this be algae that process carbon into sugar enantiomers that >> then couldn't be broken down organically?
<snip and shuffle> > > > So, from what I know, the answer to your question would be no; it's > algae > that uses water, photosynthesis and carbon dioxide to produces complex > hydrocarbons that we can burn as fuel, producing water and carbon > dioxide as > end products. Right, gotcha. I was thinking you were talking about sequestration rather than fuel generation, but that's cool too. >> > > According to folks involved, we now have left handed algae that can > directly > produced gasoline/jet fuel. The problem is that it is a lab curiosity > because it is so sensitive to fungi attack that it cannot last in real > world. That's a common problem with special bacterial cultures, especially where you have to introduce biological feedstock. It's less of an issue with, say, insulin producing bacteria as they basically mix the nutrient and culture medium up, sterilise it, and then introduce a measure of the bacteria which then go nuts until all the medium is used up and then the insulin is isolated from the broth at the end. Yeasts are also used in a similar technique. But when one is attempting to convert or produce industrial quantities of a substance like a fuel, then continuous feed/continuous extraction is preferable and this sort of productionisation can introduce issues that simply aren't relevant at the lab level. > The idea is to make this right handed, so the fungi wouldn't > recognize it. Based on this theory, we could not count on other > organisms > to interact with it to break it down unless we made them > ourselves). One > thing I asked about was accidental spreading, and suggested > engineering in a > dependence on X, which is not commonly found in nature. It turns > out that > already exists in the left-handed version. Yep. OK, so you were talking about chirality in surface antigens (interesting, not sure how hard), or possibly a completely enantiomeric biochemistry which is possible but quite hard, and is effectively the creation of a parallel life-form. Nutrient dependence (often a particular amino acid or vitamin) is pretty common in bioengineered organisms - your suggesting it was pretty good understanding for a lay-person but I'd be worried if they hadn't already thought of it. Interesting. I'm also interested in the idea of using algae to turn C02 into complex hydrocarbons for either sequestration purposes or for plastic feedstocks. Charlie. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
