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1. BBC News regional coverage:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/tayside_and_central/7853329.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/mid/7852906.stm 2.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jan/27/biofuels-second-generation Pier-munching gribble may provide breakthrough for biofuels
Wood-boring crustacean uses enzymes in its gut which could be used to create biofuels from willow and straw, say scientists
- Alok Jha, green technology correspondent
- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 27 January 2009 16.52 GMT
- Article history
Limnoria quadripunctata, otherwise known as the gribble. Photograph: Auguste Le Roux
A wood-boring crustacean that spends much of its time munching through the wooden supports that hold up piers could help provide the next breakthrough in green energy. The gribble uses enzymes in its gut to break down wood and scientists want to employ it to produce climate-friendly
biofuels from natural products such as willow and straw.
The work will form part of a
£27m project to make second-generation biofuels a commercial reality within 10 years. The new biofuels would not lead to a net release of carbon dioxide but also won't compete with land for edible crops. The money will come from the government-backed Biotechnology and
Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and a coalition of 15 industrial partners including
BP and
Ceres.
The cash is aimed at funding research to use plants more efficiently as fuel. The cell walls of plants are made of a complex sugar called cellulose, which is usually mixed with a polymer called lignin. Second-generation biofuels are made by breaking down the cellulose and fermenting it to produce fuels such as ethanol or butanol.
One of the major challenges for biologists is to find chemical enzymes that can efficiently break down cell walls which contain cellulose and lignin.
The gribble, a tiny shrimp-like crustacean, seems particularly good at this task. "It's single-handedly responsible for gnawing away at several piers on our south coast and, within its intestinal tract, are enzymes that can unlock some of the polymers [in wood-based materials]," said
Professor Katherine Smart, a plant scientist at University of Nottingham and one of the leaders of the project.
First generation biofuels are made from crops that store sugars and starches in their grains. "This has two main problems – it diverts away from the food chain but also it's very energy intensive to grow the crops," said Dr
Angela Karp of Rothamsted Research. "You have to grow them every year and it requires a lot of nitrogen fertilisers to grow those grains."
Instead, the BBSRC money will be concentrated on waste materials from normal food crops – wheat straw, spent grain – and also plants that are not grown for food production but still produce a large amount of biomass quickly, such as willows and grasses.
Karp said: "When you look at the overall energy balance of getting energy out of this kind of second-generation system, the gains in terms of energy and reductions in terms of greenhouse gases you can achieve and the waste of food crops far exceed the biofuels you can get from maize."
Smart said there was much to be done in improving the efficiency in extracting a plant's cellulose and then converting it into alcohol. "At the moment we can produce 19g of ethanol from 100g of straw. Based on the current amount of straw not used currently that means we have between 8-10bn tonnes of straw available in the UK for this kind of conversion. That could produce about a 10% of current use of petrol."
Karp said the research would additionally focus on finding ways to grow these plants on the marginal land – Karp said there were at least 3m hectares in the UK that could be turned over for this purpose – and also in selecting varieties that grew the most biomass in the quickest time.
The government's target is to source 10% of UK's energy needs from biofuels by 2010, part of an ambition to reduce carbon emissions by 80% by 2050. Announcing the money at a briefing today, the government's
science minister Paul Drayson, who races cars powered by second generation biofuels, said: "Investment in science and innovation are going to be what gets us out of the global economic downturn. This £27m investment represents a real example of where research has the potential to address one of the biggest challenges of our time, climate change, but also an area where the UK has real strength."
3.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article5600646.ece From The Times
January 28, 2009
Wood-boring marine bug the four-spotted gribble aids biofuel research
Lewis Smith, Environment Reporter A marine bug that eats boat bottoms and pier supports has been identified as the likely key to improving the efficiency of biofuel production.
Four-spotted gribbles are able to break down cellulose in wood to make sugar. Scientists are convinced that by mimicking the process they will be able to produce better biofuel.
Research is under way to pinpoint the enzymes produced in the bug's stomach, and the genes that control them, so that the process can be applied to woody biofuel crops such as willow.
The investigation is being carried out as part of research by the Sustainable Bioenergy Centre, a £27million initiative announced yesterday that is the biggest public investment in bioenergy research.
Getting at and breaking down the cellulose in woody plant material, such as wheat husks, straw and miscanthus grass, is a difficult task for biofuel producers. At present they lose more than 30 per cent of the potential energy and are anxious to identify how it is achieved in the natural world by organisms such as gribbles, termites, bacteria and fungi.
Gribbles, which live in pairs in holes bored into wood, were identified as ideal subjects for study because while many other creatures digest wood, such as shipworms, they are the only ones which have guts devoid of microbes.
The absence of microbes is expected to make the hunt for the enzymes and genes easier because the digestive system should be easier to understand.
Professor Simon McQueen-Mason, of the University of York, said of the gribble: "It's an isopod — it's like a marine woodlouse. It's a few millimetres long and bores into wood. The reason we focus on the gribble is that it is very unusual in that it has a sterile digestive tract.
"The gut is like a reactor with wood. We can go straight to the gribble itself and isolate the genes and enzymes that are involved in that wood degredation."
The four-spotted gribble,
Limnoria quadripunctata, is one of four species of gribble native to British waters, and is found mainly on the South Coast. More than 50 species are found worldwide.
Four-spotted gribbles are known to have caused damage to Yarmouth Pier in the Isle of Wight and to underwater wooden structures at Portsmouth Harbour, where it is collected for research.
Professor McQueen-Mason said that before becoming a scientist he was a fisherman in the Isle of Wight, where he had to clean the bottoms of wooden boats and became aware of the wood-boring abilities of the creature.
The study is being carried out on behalf of the Sustainable Bioenergy Centre, which was set up by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). The role of the centre, which will have bases at several universities, is to improve biofuel production so that dependence on fossil fuels can be reduced.
Second-generation biofuel crops include willow and other woody vegetation that is more difficult to break down into sugars and then to into ethanol than the first-generation crops.
Unlike first-generation biofuel crops, they can be grown without competing against food crops because they can thrive on marginal land. They can also include unwanted agricultural materials such as waste straw and husks.
Lord Drayson, the Science and Innovation Minister, said in London that the centre should play a significant role in helping Britain to reduce its fossil fuel consumption.
Professor Douglas Kell, the BBSRC chief executive, said of the creation of the research centre: "This is a huge breakthrough for second-generation biofuels. It's the way forward — one day our cars could be run by fuel obtained from straw."
4.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/how-the-gribble-can-power-our-cars-1517838.html How the gribble can power our cars
By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor
Wednesday, 28 January 2009
It sounds like a fantasy character created by Roald Dahl, or played by Jim Carrey – the gribble. But in fact it's a small marine creature resembling a woodlouse, and it may provide the key to a major breakthrough for biofuels in Britain.
For the gribble bores into the planks of boats and the pillars of piers and eats them, and its wood-consuming technique may be adapted by scientists to turn wood into sustainable motor fuel on a vast scale.
The gribble, or to be precise, the four-spot gribble, Limnoria quadripunctata, is one of the key elements in Britain's biggest-ever publicly-funded bioenergy research programme, announced yesterday. A total of £27m is to be spent over five years in creating so-called "second generation" biofuels, which are much more efficient and environmentally friendly than present biofuels, which are largely manufactured from food crops such as maize, wheat or sugar cane.
The second-generation compounds will be derived from non-food plant material, principally plant waste such as straw and wood, with willow being especially favoured. And if they can isolate the enzymes the gribble uses to extract the nutritious sugars from wood (from which biofuels such as ethanol can be made) scientists may be able to make the process much more efficient.
Simon McQueen-Mason, professor of materials biology at the University of York, who came across the gribble when he was a professional fisherman on the Isle of Wight for six years before beginning his academic career. "I used to clean the bottom of other people's boats, and gribble was a major problem," he said. Now his laboratory will investigate gribbles collected from rotting wood by staff from the University of Portsmouth, identifying their enzymes and trying to reproduce them synthetically.
Success is likely to mean an enormous expansion of willow as a biofuel crop in Britain, on some of the three million acres of lesser quality or marginal farmland countrywide, which would go a long way to meeting Britain's targets of drawing 5 per cent of motor fuel from biological sources by 2010 and 10 per cent by 2020.
5.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-01/babs-bep012709.php Public release date: 27-Jan-2009
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Contact: Nancy Mendoza
press.office@bbsrc.ac.uk01-793-413-355
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council Biggest ever public investment in bioenergy to help provide clean, green and sustainable fuels
The biggest ever single UK public investment in bioenergy research has been announced today (27 January) by the main funding agency for the biosciences – the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).
The £27M BBSRC Sustainable Bioenergy Centre has been launched to provide the science to underpin and develop the important and emerging UK sustainable bioenergy sector – and to replace the petrol in our cars with fuels derived from plants.
Sustainable bioenergy offers the potential to provide a significant source of clean, low carbon and secure energy, and to generate thousands of new 'green collar' jobs. It uses non-food crops, such as willow, industrial and agricultural waste products and inedible parts of crops, such as straw, and so does not take products out of the food chain.
Minister of State for Science and Innovation, Lord Drayson, said: "Investing £27 million in this new centre involves the single biggest UK public investment in bioenergy research. The centre is exactly the sort of initiative this country needs to lead the way in transforming the exciting potential of sustainable biofuels into a widespread technology that can replace fossil fuels.
"The centre is a great example of the UK investing in innovative areas which have the benefits of creating new green collar jobs as well as helping us to meet the global challenges of climate change and reducing carbon emissions."
The BBSRC Sustainable Bioenergy Centre is focussed on six research hubs of academic and industrial partners, based at each of the Universities of Cambridge, Dundee and York and Rothamsted Research and two at the University of Nottingham. Another 7 universities and institutes are involved and 15 industrial partners across the hubs are contributing around £7M of the funding.
The Centre's research activities will encompass many different stages of bioenergy production, from widening the range of materials that can be the starting point for bioenergy to improving the crops used by making them grow more efficiently to changing plant cell walls. The Centre will also analyse the complete economic and environmental life cycle of potential sources of bioenergy.
This means the researchers will be working to make sustainable bioenergy a practical solution by improving not only the yield and quality of non-food biomass and the processes used to convert this into biofuels but ensuring that the whole system is economically and socially viable.
BBSRC Chief Executive, Prof Douglas Kell, said: "The UK has a world leading research base in plant and microbial science. The BBSRC Sustainable Bioenergy Centre draws together some of these world beating scientists in order to help develop technology and understanding to support the sustainable bioenergy sector. The Centre is taking a holistic systems-level approach, examining all the relevant areas of science needed for sustainable bioenergy and studying the economic and social impact of the bioenergy process.
"By working closely with industrial partners the Centre's scientists will be able to quickly translate their progress into practical solutions to all our benefit – and ultimately, by supporting the sustainable bioenergy sector, help to create thousands of new 'green collar' jobs in the UK."
###
If covering this story please include a link to the Centre's website – http://www.bsbec.bbsrc.ac.uk
VIDEO FOOTAGE AVAILABLE ON REQUEST AND DOWNLOAD
- Video introducing BBSRC Sustainable Bioenergy Centre
- Interview footage of Centre scientists
- Footage of laboratory and energy crop fields
- B-roll available to courier of energy crop fields, harvesting, moving vehicles, Centre laboratories.
IMAGES AVAILABLE ON REQUEST AND DOWNLOAD
- Laboratories, energy crop fields, bioenergy images, microscope images of plant structures, plants, marine wood borers and fermentation systems.
DOWNLOAD RESOURCES FROM: http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/media/releases/2009/090127_public_investment_bioenergy.html
CONTACTS
BBSRC External Relations
Matt Goode, Mobile: 07766 423 372, Tel: 01793 413299, email: matt.goode@bbsrc.ac.uk
Nancy Mendoza, Tel: 01793 413355, email: nancy.mendoza@bbsrc.ac.uk
Notes to Editors
The BBSRC Sustainable Bioenergy Centre (BSBEC) is an innovative £27M academic-industry partnership that will help to deliver the science to underpin development in this important and emerging sector. The funding of the Centre has been guided in part by the recommendations of a review of BBSRC's bioenergy research portfolio published in 2006. The review was chaired by then Council member, Prof Douglas Kell.
The new centre is based around six research hubs of academic and industrial partners.
BSBEC provides a focus for ensuring sustainability, widening the range of materials that can be used as feedstock (raw materials) for bioenergy, changing plant cell walls, making them more amenable to breakdown and optimising fermentation to release energy
BSBEC is made up of six hubs or programmes.
BSBEC Cell Wall Lignin Programme – Improving barley straw for lignin production and transferring the new knowledge to other crops. Lignin is a polymer in plants that makes it difficult to access sugars for bioenergy production. The programme aims to alter lignin properties in barley to make it easier to produce bioenergy without reducing the quality of the crop.
University of Dundee with associated programme members: University of York, SCRI and RERAD.
BSBEC Cell Wall Sugars Programme – developing strategies to improve plants and enzymes for increased sugar release from biomass. The programme aims to better understand how sugars are locked into plant cell walls. By doing this we can select the right plants and the right enzymes to release the maximum amount of sugars for conversion to biofuels.
University of Cambridge with associated programme members: Newcastle University, Shell and Novozymes.
BSBEC Lignocellulosic Conversion to Bioethanol (LACE) Programme – using agricultural and wood-industry wastes to create biofuels. The programme is aiming to optimise the release of sugars from plant cell walls to produce a fermentable material to produce fuels. It will also work on microbes to efficiently turn the material into fuel.
University of Nottingham with associated programme members: University of Bath, University of Surrey, BP, Bioethanol Ltd, Briggs of Burton, British Sugar, Coors Brewers, DSM, Ethanol Technology, HGCA, Pursuit Dynamics, SABMiller and Scottish Whisky Research Institute.
BSBEC Marine Wood Borer Enzyme Discovery Programme – New enzymes for the conversion of non-food plant biomass into biofuels from marine wood borers. Wood and straw contain polysaccharides that if converted to simple sugars could be fermented into biofuels. At the moment we do not have suitable enzymes to break down these woody materials. However, marine wood borers consume huge amounts of woody material and their guts have all the enzymes needed to break it down. The programme aims to exploit this.
University of York with associated programme members: University of Portsmouth and Syngenta Biomass Traits Group.
BSBEC Perennial Bioenergy Crops Programme – optimising biomass yield and composition for sustainable biofuels. The programme aims to improve yields of fast growing trees and grasses and to make more of the plants' carbon available for conversion into biofuels and to do this without increasing inputs such as fertilizers.
Rothamsted Research with associated programme members: Institute of Biological, Environmental and Rural Sciences (IBERS), Imperial College London, University of Cambridge, Ceres and BP.
BSBEC Second Generation Sustainable, Bacterial Biofuels Programme – optimising production of the more effective second generation biofuel biobutanol from non-food biomass. Biobutanol is a superior biofuel to ethanol but currently available microbes used in biobutanol production processes are inefficient, produce unwanted by-products and cannot use plant cell walls directly as a feed material. The programme aims to generate and test new bacterial strains to overcome this.
University of Nottingham with associated programme members: Newcastle University and TMO Renewables.
About BBSRC
The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) is the UK funding agency for research in the life sciences. Sponsored by Government, BBSRC annually invests around £420 million in a wide range of research that makes a significant contribution to the quality of life for UK citizens and supports a number of important industrial stakeholders including the agriculture, food, chemical, healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors. BBSRC carries out its mission by funding internationally competitive research, providing training in the biosciences, fostering opportunities for knowledge transfer and innovation and promoting interaction with the public and other stakeholders on issues of scientific interest in universities, centres and institutes.
The Babraham Institute, Institute for Animal Health, Institute of Food Research, John Innes Centre and Rothamsted Research are Institutes of BBSRC. The Institutes conduct long-term, mission-oriented research using specialist facilities. They have strong interactions with industry, Government departments and other end-users of their research.
For more information see: http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk
VIDEO FOOTAGE, IMAGES AND INFORMATION PACK AVAILABLE – SEE http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/media
6. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-01/uon-tfo012709.php
Public release date: 27-Jan-2009
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Contact: Professor Katherine Smart
katherine.smart@nottingham.ac.uk
44-011-595-16214
University of Nottingham
Transportation fuels of the future: Nottingham leads the way
Fruit and veg may be good for you but in 10 years time we could be replacing fossil fuels and helping to save our planet by using the inedible bits that we throw away to run our cars, boats and planes.
The University of Nottingham is to lead the way in the development of sustainable bioenergy fuels — Ethanol and Butanol. These sustainable bioenergy fuels use non-food crops, such as willow, industrial and agricultural waste products and inedible parts of crops, such as straw, so do not take products out of the food chain.
The University of Nottingham is leading two of six research projects being run by the national £27m BBSRC Sustainable Bioenergy Centre which was announced in London today — January 27 2009. This will be the biggest ever single UK public investment in bioenergy research. The centre has been funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).
Experts in microbiology and brewing science at The University of Nottingham will be leading the two five-year research programmes.
Katherine Smart, Professor of Brewing Science in the School of Biosciences, and a world leading fermentation scientist, will lead a team of researchers hoping to develop yeast capable of breaking down plant cell walls. Scientists will then be able to break down the inedible and unusable parts of plants such as the skin and stalks to produce ethanol. They will be collaborating with University of Bath, University of Surrey, BP, Bioethanol Ltd, Briggs of Burton, British Sugar, Coors Brewers, DSM, Ethanol Technology, HGCA, Pursuit Dynamics, SABMiller and Scottish Whisky Research Institute.
Professor Katherine Smart said: "The government is committed to producing replacement transport fuels. We can already buy petrol with five per cent ethanol in it but this is imported and it is important that Britain has strong energy security. Our fuel will be produced through materials which currently end up in landfill or simply go to waste. The challenge is to break down the toughest part of the plant, unlock the sugars, and by developing the very best yeast find an extremely efficient way of converting these sugars into ethanol."
The green tops of carrots, straw that is currently ploughed back into the ground, wood shavings, the husks from barley grains, even the stalks from grapes can be used to produce ethanol.
The bacteria that produce butanol belong to an ancient group of bacteria called Clostridium.
Nigel Minton, a professor of Applied Molecular Microbiology, and a world expert in the genetic modification of Clostridium bacteria, will be developing a process for the large scale production of butanol by developing microbes capable of converting plant waste into this biofuel.
Butanol has significant advantages over ethanol. It has a higher energy content, is easier to transport, can be blended with petrol at much higher concentrations and even has potential for use as an aviation fuel
Professor Minton said: "We really are focussed on the holy grail of biofuel research — developing bacteria that are able to convert non-food, plant cell wall material into a superior petrol replacement, butanol. If you had asked me a couple of years ago, I would have said it was not possible. However, my team have now developed some world beating technologies which will allow us to generate the Clostridium strains required."
The research will be carried out in collaboration with Newcastle University and TMO Renewables Ltd.
Researchers from across the scientific spectrum — chemists, engineers, microbiologists, mathematicians and fermentation scientists — will be involved in the two research programmes.
Minister of State for Science and Innovation, Lord Drayson, said: "Investing £27 million in this new centre involves the single biggest UK public investment in bioenergy research. The centre is exactly the sort of initiative this country needs to lead the way in transforming the exciting potential of sustainable biofuels into a widespread technology that can replace fossil fuels.
"The expertise and resources of The University of Nottingham makes it well placed to make a valuable contribution to the new BBSRC Sustainable Bioenergy Centre and help to make sustainable, environmentally-friendly bioenergy a reality."
The £27m BBSRC Sustainable Bioenergy Centre has been launched to provide the science to underpin and develop the important and emerging UK sustainable bioenergy sector.
The BBSRC Sustainable Bioenergy Centre is focussed on six research hubs of academic and industrial partners, based at each of the Universities of Cambridge, Dundee and York and Rothamsted Research and two at The University of Nottingham. Another seven universities and institutes are involved and 15 industrial partners across the hubs are contributing around £7m of the funding.
The Centre's research activities will encompass many different stages of bioenergy production, from widening the range of materials that can be the starting point for bioenergy to improving the crops used by making them grow more efficiently to changing plant cell walls. The Centre will also analyse the complete economic and environmental life cycle of potential sources of bioenergy.
Currently the fuels we use to provide electricity or to run cars and other vehicles is derived from coal, oil and gas. Their use is a major contributor to global warming through the production of carbon dioxide. And it is projected that in 50 years time these fossil fuels will be exhausted. So the search is on to find more environmentally friendly and renewable systems for producing liquid fuels to run cars and other vehicles.
###
Notes to editors: The University of Nottingham is ranked in the UK's Top 10 and the World's Top 100 universities by the Shanghai Jiao Tong (SJTU) and Times Higher (THE) World University Rankings.
More than 90 per cent of research at The University of Nottingham is of international quality, according to RAE 2008, with almost 60 per cent of all research defined as 'world-leading' or 'internationally excellent'. Research Fortnight analysis of RAE 2008 ranks the University 7th in the UK by research power. In 27 subject areas, the University features in the UK Top Ten, with 14 of those in the Top Five.
The University provides innovative and top quality teaching, undertakes world-changing research, and attracts talented staff and students from 150 nations. Described by The Times as Britain's "only truly global university", it has invested continuously in award-winning campuses in the United Kingdom, China and Malaysia. Twice since 2003 its research and teaching academics have won Nobel Prizes. The University has won the Queen's Award for Enterprise in both 2006 (International Trade) and 2007 (Innovation — School of Pharmacy), and was named 'Entrepreneurial University of the Year' at the Times Higher Education Awards 2008.
The BBSRC Sustainable Bioenergy Centre (BSBEC) is an innovative £27m academic-industry partnership that will help to deliver the science to underpin development in this important and emerging sector. The new centre is based around six research hubs of academic and industrial partners. BSBEC provides a focus for ensuring sustainability, widening the range of materials that can be used as feedstock (raw materials) for bioenergy, changing plant cell walls, making them more amenable to breakdown and optimising fermentation to release energy. BSBEC is made up of six hubs or programmes. For more information go to — www.bsbec.bbsrc.ac.uk
Story Credits
More information is available from Professor Katherine Smart on +44 (0)115 951 6214, katherine.smart@nottingham.ac.uk; or Professor Nigel Minton on +44 (0) 115 846 7458, nigel.minton@nottingham.ac.uk; or Matt Goode, BBSRC External Relations on 07766 423 372 or +44 (0)1793 413299, matt.goode@bbsrc.ac.uk;
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