E-Coli Pathway to butanol from UCLA (and DuPont?)

Researchers at UCLA have developed a pathway for producing variants of butanol and C5-based alcohols using E.Coli.

This strategy leverages the E. coli host’s highly active amino acid biosynthetic pathway by shifting part of it to alcohol production. In particular, the research team achieved high-yield, high-specificity production of isobutanol from glucose.

“These alcohols are typically trace byproducts in fermentation,” Liao said. “To modify an organism to produce these compounds usually results in toxicity in the cell. We bypassed this difficulty by leveraging the native metabolic networks in E. coli but altered its intracellular chemistry using genetic engineering to produce these alcohols.”

Or in other words, this isn’t a fermentation, this is using the internal biochemistry, aided through genetic alterations, to convert glucose into 4 and 5-carbon alcohols.

E.Coli is widely used in academia and industry for doing recombinant DNA-based processes. For example, Genentech uses E.Coli to manufacture several of its products and is an expression platform for much of its research efforts. It’s a well understood bacterium so it’s no surprise that this type of research has proved successful.

In one of GreenCarCongress’s comments, a user noted that DuPont had patented this type of a process last year (2007). I looked this up and found the cited patent application.

The Energy Bill Impact

It’s done. It’s signed. The 2007 Energy Bill (officially as HR 6 The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007) has several far-reaching policies. I wanted to take a look at two important ones: the expanded renewable fuels standard (RFS) and the increased CAFE standard.

Expanded RFS
The Expanded RFS standard, if achieved, could go a long way to reducing our petroleum-based fuel demand. I ran a few numbers using the schedule included in the bill (and the Renewable Fuel Association website) to see what type of investment would be required to meet the volume capacity requirements. If we assume that capital costs for a corn ethanol facility are around $1.50/gallon of annual capacity and that advanced ethanol facility run around $2.50/gallon, we get the following investment amounts:

This is doable, from a magnitude standpoint. It would require a lot of renewed enthusiasm around the industry. It’s important to note, not surprisingly, are that corn ethanol has a limited future and that the future of the industry requires advancements in cellulosic ethanol…right now.