Microbes turn waste into fuel

Everybody loves eating greek yogurt, its great for you, packed with protein, and has plenty of probiotics in it to aid in digestion.  However, the process of creating the perfect yogurt formula creates a large amount of waste in the form of liquid whey.  In an article found on Science Daily, researchers have discovered a way to possibly turn this waste into biofuel or feedstock additives.  By using microbes to to break down the leftover fructose molecules into two more useful compounds such as caproic acid and caprylic acid.  Being able to break down this waste material means a better source of additives for feedstock of animals in the place of antibiotics.
This article interested me because I eat a lot of greek yogurt but did not know how much waste was actually created.  With researchers looking for new ways to turn waste into something useful there would be very little actual waste as the majority of the compounds needed to create greek yogurt have a purpose, whether it is to be put into the yogurt itself or to be sent elsewhere as another compound to be added to another formula.

Bacteria Take a Deadly Risk to Survive









In order for bacteria to survive, they need to change and adapt to survive in certain circumstances and environments. Scientist at the Centre of Microbial and Plant Genetics at KU Leuven (University of Leuven), Belgium discovered that these bacteria can adapt at different rates, with this a range of problems may be addressed such as fuel all the way to medicines and treatments for certain diseases. The mutation of bacteria rises when they are under stress, but to much mutation weakens the bacteria. If the balance between the two is to high, the bacteria goes through hypermutation which ultimately kills the cell.


This research is a crucial part of our future because with the control over the balance of a bacteria's mutation will offer new perspectives on the production of biofuel. When the bacteria is put into solutions with high concentration of methanol or ethanol, the bacteria will be able to survive longer under the conditions thus raising the production of biofuel.




Links:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170502112545.htm

https://phys.org/news/2017-05-bacteria-deadly-survive.html

Another Victory For Beer Science

Pictured above is an orange colored gall which is responsible for harboring the species of yeast that is used to make lager beer. Thanks to a brand new method, interspecies yeast hybrids (like the ones used to make lager beer) are now able to be made in the lab easily. This means that the makers of beer, wine, biofuels, and many other products will now soon have other strains of the yeast species to work with.

This discovery is great because an interspecies hybrid of yeast has a one in a billion chance of appearing in nature which means that waiting on nature to create the next new yeast is not very efficient. Now in a laboratory they can achieve a hybrid in about one in a thousand cells. 

Currently popular strains of yeast used to make beer and wine tend to be sterile which means they can't create spores and therefore can't make more of themselves to continue making the beer and wine. With the new interspecies hybrids and the use of plasmids, a trait to make the popular yeast strain fertile could be implanted into the DNA of the popular yeast.