A new microorganism has been created: it turns cardboard boxes into biodiesel

Using biodiesel instead of fossil fuels will help combat climate change caused by

greenhouse gases, as well as in reductionfine dust emissions. However, the current method of producing biodiesel by chemically treating vegetable oil or used cooking oil (palm or soybean) is not always reliable. Sometimes there are simply not enough raw materials or they are difficult to obtain.

PhD Sun-Mi Lee and her team fromThe Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) Clean Energy Research Center announced that they have created a new microorganism. It is capable of producing biodiesel precursors from lignocellulosic biomass. Recall that a precursor is a substance that participates in a reaction leading to the formation of a necessary compound, for example, biofuel.

Lignocellulosic biomass itself—the dry matter of plants—is formed as a byproduct of agriculture and logging. A new microorganism - YSXID - a strain of fungus Yarrowia lipolytica, uses xylose to achieve high-yield lipid production from lignocellulose. Yarrowia lipolytica - a type of yeast belonging to the order Saccharomycetales.

YSXID produces biodiesel precursors inthe process of sugar metabolism in lignocellulosic biomass, which the fungus feeds on. Sugar in lignocellulosic biomass consists of 65–70% glucose and 30–35% xylose. While microorganisms that exist in nature are effective in the production of diesel fuel precursors by glucose metabolism, they do not feed on xylose, which limits the raw material yield. A new microorganism that uses xylose removes these restrictions and allows much more raw materials to be produced for biofuels from more affordable products.

Read also

Found the alleged kingdom of the disappeared Hittites. What have archaeologists found?

The Doomsday glacier turned out to be more dangerous than scientists thought. We tell the main thing

Matter around a black hole was first obtained in a laboratory. What does it mean?