WILL DIESEL BE COMING FROM FUNGII SOON?
Petroleum geologists normally look for oil underground. Gary Strobel made his strike by pruning a tree. In a recent issue of Science an article in the American journal Microbiology is quoted in which Strobel, a plant pathologist at Montana State University of Bozeman, and colleagues report that Gliocladium roseum - a novel fungus they discovered hidden within a stem from a scraggly tree in northern Patagonia - produces dozens of the same midlength hydrocarbons found in gasoline, diesel fuel, and jet fuel. The fungus may help companies convert the chemical energy stored in plants into liquid fuels capable of replacing fossil fuels.
The discovery is "a really great contribution," says Stephen Del Cardayre, a synthetic biologist and vice president for research and development at LS9, a South San Francisco-based start-up working to use microbes to produce renewable fuels. Even though the new fungus pumps out only small quantities of fuel hydrocarbons, researchers might use its genes to engineer other industrial microbes to do the job more efficiently. "The beauty is that even if the chemical reaction isn't perfect, you can always improve it," he says.
A recent sample-collection trip to South America found other novel endophytic fungi that turn out a wide variety of hydrocarbons. "There is just huge swaths of biodiversity to be discovered out there," Strobel says. That may persuade the next generation of oil explorers to trade in their seismographs for pruning shears, the Science editor concluded.