Next generation super powerful fuel from bacteria

The next generation of super powerful fuel, capable of arming missiles and space rockets may come from an engineered bacterium. 

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have engineered a bacterium to synthesize pinene - a hydrocarbon produced by trees that could potentially replace high-energy fuels such as JP-10 in missiles and other aerospace applications. 

By inserting enzymes from trees into the bacterium, Georgia Tech scientist Stephen Sarria boosted pinene production six-fold over earlier bioengineering efforts. To be competitive, the researchers will have to boost their production of pinene 26-fold. 

Though a more dramatic improvement will be needed before pinene can compete with petroleum-based JP-10, the scientists believe they have identified the major obstacles that must be overcome to reach that goal. 

They say it may be possible to produce pinene at a cost lower than that of petroleum-based sources. 

If that can be done - and if the resulting bio-fuel operates well in these applications - that could open the door for lighter and more powerful engines fueled by increased supplies of high-energy fuels. 

Pinene dimers which are result from the dimerization of pinene have already been shown to have an energy density similar to that of JP-10. 

"Fuels with high energy densities are important in applications where minimizing fuel weight is important. The gasoline used to power automobiles and the diesel used mainly in trucks both contain less energy per litre than the JP-10," the scientists said. 

The molecular arrangement of JP-10 accounts for its higher energy density. 

The amount of JP-10 that can be extracted from each barrel of oil is limited and sources of potentially comparable compounds such as trees can't provide much help. The limited supply drives the price of JP-10 to around $25 per gallon. 

That price point gives researchers working on a biofuel alternative a real advantage over scientists working on replacing gasoline and diesel. 

"We have made a sustainable precursor to a tactical fuel with a high energy density. We are concentrating on making a drop-in fuel that looks just like what is being produced from petroleum and can fit into existing distribution systems. If you are trying to make an alternative to gasoline, you are competing against $3 per gallon. That requires a long optimization process. Our process will be competitive with $25 per gallon in a much shorter time," said Peralta-Yahya from Georgia Tech. 

"Even though we are still in the milligrams per litre level, because the product we are trying to make is so much more expensive than diesel or gasoline means that we are relatively closer," she said. 

While much research has gone into producing ethanol and bio-diesel fuels comparatively little work has been done on replacements for the high-energy JP-10. The scientists therefore set out to improve on previous efforts by studying alternative enzymes that could be inserted into the E coli bacterium. 

They settled on two classes of enzymes - three pinene synthases and three geranyl diphosphate synthases- and experimented to see which combinations produced the best results.

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