Dana Wolhbach: Engineered yeast to boost biomass fuel yeilds
Dana Wolhbach, Department of Genetics
Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center
UW-Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences
dana.wohlbach@gmail.com
(608) 265-0863
3:09 – Total Time
Yeast engineered to produce biofuels faster
0:19 – Potential of new yeast strain
1:15 – Creating a new, better yeast
2:24 – Increasing biofuel yields
3:00 – Lead out
TRANSCRIPT
Sevie Kenyon: Dana, welcome to our microphone. Can you tell us what the potential is of this discovery you’re working on?
Dana Wolhbach: We’ve been working on developing strains of yeast that have the potential to improve bio-energy production. Currently, the strains of yeast that we use for fermentations of bioenergy aren’t able to use all the available plant sugars.
We are interested in developing yeasts that can use all of the sugar more quickly and more efficiently. And, if we can do this, we’ll speed up the process of bio-energy production.
We are kind of right on the cusp of having what we believe are some really great strains of yeast, perhaps within a year or two we will be able to have some yeast that we can comfortably say are better then what’s available.
Sevie Kenyon: Dana, I’d like you to talk about the science a little bit. Can you describe the process we’re talking about?
Dana Wolhbach: We decided to take advantage of what nature had already provided for us. The yeast that we normally use in industry are the yeast that you can buy in a supermarket packet that you would use for baking. But, there are many other species of yeast and those are yeast that have naturally evolved to use this unique plant sugar called Xylose.
Xylose is the second most abundant plant sugar and that’s the sugar that the normal yeast, the yeast that you think of, don’t use very well. We studied these Bark Beetle yeasts, looked at their genome sequences, were able to identify some genes that are involved in using this Xylose sugar. We then engineered those genes into the normal yeast and we were able to get the industrial yeast to use both Xylose and all the other plant sugars.
Sevie Kenyon: Dana, can you give us a sense of how these yeast may improve or increase the yield from a given amount of biomass?
Dana Wolhbach: So, a given amount of biomass will have a certain proportion of this Xylose sugar and depending on the plant material, it could be up to half of the available sugar. So, you can imagine if we have a strain of yeast that can use only half of the available sugar, we’ll only be making half of the available bio-fuels.
But, if we use the strains [of yeast] that we’ve engineered, which can now conceivably use 100 percent of the sugar, we will be potentially making the maximum amount of bio-fuel from a given plant material.
Sevie Kenyon: We’ve been visiting with Dana Wohlbach department of Genetics, University of Wisconsin, College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, Madison, Wisconsin and I’m Sevie Kenyon.