To make beer and wine, a microscopic fungus called yeast consumes sugars in fruits or grains and converts them into ethanol (alcohol) and carbon dioxide. But the microbe yeast cannot tolerate ...

Researchers achieved a breakthrough in understanding the vulnerability of microbes to the alcohols they produce during fermentation of plant biomass. One limitation of producing biofuel is that the ...

One limitation of producing biofuel is that the alcohol created by fermentation is toxic to the microbes that produce it. Now scientists are closer to overcoming this obstacle. Researchers from the ...

Converting petroleum into fuels involves crude chemistry first invented by humans in the 1800s. Meanwhile, bacteria have been producing carbon-based energy molecules for billions of years. Which do ...

QUABBIN RESERVOIR, Mass. -- QUABBIN RESERVOIR, Mass. Ten years ago, an assistant from a microbiology laboratory took a hike near the shore of the vast Quabbin Reservoir, which supplies water to Boston ...

The bacterium C. autoethanogenum (middle, top) is used in industrial conversion plants to detoxify waste gases rich in CO 2 and CO while producing various compounds, including the biofuel ethanol.

Microbes are hungry. All the time. And they live everywhere, in enormous numbers. We might not see them with the naked eye, but they are in soils, lakes, oceans, hydrothermal vents, our homes, and ...

Kevin Lofgren in the lab holding a flask containing the pure biodiesel product made with the process described in the journal Energy & Fuels. UC Santa Cruz chemists have discovered a new way to ...

UC Santa Cruz chemists have discovered a new way to produce biodiesel from waste oil that both simplifies the process and requires relatively mild heat. This discovery has the potential to make the ...

To continue reading this content, please enable JavaScript in your browser settings and refresh this page. Cambridge-based biotech startup Promethegen Corp. wants to ...

Scientists are genetically engineering microbes to withstand industrial conditions for biofuel production. Researchers found that partially suppressing genes in cyanobacteria improved their growth ...