Gribble hold key to wood biofuels
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For centuries, seafarers were plagued by wood-eating gribble that destroyed their ships and these creatures continue to wreak damage on wooden piers and docks in coastal communities.
But new research by scientists at the BBSRC Sustainable Bioenergy Centre at York and Portsmouth Universities is uncovering how the tiny marine isopod digests the apparently indigestible.
By examining genes that are expressed in the guts of gribble, the researchers have demonstrated that its digestive system contains enzymes that could hold the key to converting wood and straw into liquid biofuels.
A team headed by Prof Simon McQueen-Mason and Prof Neil Bruce at York, and Dr Simon Cragg at Portsmouth has found that the gribble digestive tract is dominated by enzymes that attack the polymers that make up wood. One of the most abundant enzymes is a cellulose degrading enzyme never before seen in animals.
Unlike termites and other wood-eating animals, gribble have no helpful microbes in their digestive system. This means that they must possess all of the enzymes needed to convert wood into sugars themselves.
Prof McQueen-Mason, of the Centre for Novel Agricultural Products (CNAP) in the Department of Biology at York, said: ’This may provide clues as to how this conversion could be performed in an industrial setting.’
The scientists at York are now studying the enzymes to establish how they work and whether they can be adapted to industrial applications. Perhaps one day soon seafarers will be sailing the seas on ships powered with biofuels produced with gribble enzymes.
Duncan Eggar, BBSRC Bioenergy Champion, said: ’The world needs to quickly reduce its dependence on fossil fuels and sustainably produced bioenergy offers the potential to rapidly introduce liquid transport fuels into our current energy mix.’
The BBSRC Sustainable Bioenergy Centre is a £26m research investment by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and has six research programmes at universities and research institutes.
Readers' comments (4)
Anonymous | 10 Mar 2010 1:42 pm
Did someone calculate how much wood would be needed to replace fossile fuel. I doubt the total wooden biomass would be enough cover teh anual fuel consumtion.
Typically trees need around 20 y to grow to harvestable size.
Ancient Seafarers made most fo the forest in the mediteranean to be converted into ships. They should not be allowed to take the rest for fuel.
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J, Warks | 11 Mar 2010 8:44 am
Providing it uses waste wood, fine. Garden cuttings to offcuts and used/unwanted furniture (which I cannot get rid of without having to drive to "tip" myself, and I suspect it is not recycled even then) the more uses for this the better.
I have just one friend with an AGA stove. I wish more of us had stuck with open fires instead of that first "dash for gas" thirty years or more ago.
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Brian Pollard | 11 Mar 2010 8:56 am
In "Without Hot Air", David McKay shows that in Europe, you can at best produce the equivalent of 0.6W/sq m of biomass (an offshore wind farm manages an average of 3W/sq m by comparison). If we covered the whole of the UK countryside (4000 sq m per person) with short-rotation coppice, that could provide 56kWh per day. At present UK car usage requires 16kWh / day so we could power all our cars by covering 30% of our countryside with coppiced trees. We would of course need another 60% for the 37kWh per day of home and workplace heating we use.
I would suggest that getting energy from wood or other plants is a diversion - it is not going to be able to provide us with serious amounts of energy if we want to grow food as well.
Does this seem like a good use of land?
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Alex Wilks | 12 Mar 2010 12:43 pm
Much though I would like to see new forests all over England once more - rather than houses, car parks and out of town retail nightmares - I really dont think this is a viable solution. What we need to meet demand is a remote facility that generates a lot of power relative to its size, on demand, and relatively cheaply. In other words atomic power stations. It is the only way, and about time we faced up to it.
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