[/caption]An article from Science Daily describes a new method of producing biofuel from horse feces. Another article was published on MITnews. Cellulose is the compound used for making biofuels from non-food plant materials but, it is difficult to extract through the lignin within the cell walls of plants. In order to do this lignin must be removed, enzyme must be used to break down cellulose into sugars, then the sugars are digested by microbes to ferment into alcohol to produce the fuel. This process is extensive and expensive.
A fungus found in the digestive tract of a horse lives on lignin-rich plants and converts the cellulose into sugars for the animal. This could make the process biofuels much easier and less expensive. Scientists are now trying to isolate the genes that produce these enzymes and genetically engineer them into yeasts. Since yeasts are already commercially used for products such as antibiotics and foods, the production technology already exists. So far all the genetic material of this gut fungus use to break down the cellulose has been isolated from horse feces. These protein-encoding materials are named “transcriptome” facilitated the identification of hundreds of enzymes capable of breaking down the lignin and extracting cellulose.
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