A virtual centre for second-generation bioenergy research
As announced on our website, I was pleased to participate last Tuesday (Jan 27) in the press briefing and formal launch of BSBEC, a nested acronym that stands for the BBSRC Sustainable Bioenergy Centre. This is a virtual centre that represents a collaboration between a large number of research institutions and is part of the Research Councils’ Energy Programme. It involves a BBSRC investment of £20M with additional investments of £7M from industry, plus further contributions from the consortium partners.
The focus of a very exciting scientific programme is on the generation of bioenergy and transport biofuels from woody biomass and from waste materials that do not compete with food production for land (as do many so-called first-generation biofuels). The origins of this programme lay in a report from a Panel that I chaired for BBSRC, and in some of the analyses from the subsequent Gallagher report.
There is a series of processes that need to be optimised to improve the efficiency of second-generation biofuel production. The upstream end of the system is of course solar energy, and the chain progresses via photosynthesis, biomass production, biomass composition, biomass deconstruction, and fermentation. The BSBEC programme covers, and seeks to improve the efficiency of, each of these, with the potential for an overall six-fold improvement in the efficiency of energy conversion ‘from photon to fuel’. This may sound like a lot, but bear in mind that the overall efficiency of photosynthesis itself, including the dark reactions, is probably only some 1-2%!
In developing a story, journalists usually light on something they think their readers will find particularly interesting. In this case, much journalistic interest focussed on the part of the programme concerned with marine wood borers (Limnoria isopods), a potential source of novel enzymes for deconstructing woody biomass and turning it into fermentable sugars. The journalistic attraction of this part of the programme evidently came in part from the wonderful trivial name these organisms have acquired, viz ‘gribbles’. The etymology of ‘gribble’ is somewhat uncertain, most commentators (e.g. M-W online) seeing it as a diminutive of ‘grub’. I suspect (and I am not alone, though it is not listed) that it may be onomatopoeic, from the presumed sound of their wood-boring activities. Amusingly, the term also has a meaning in computing: “Random binary data rendered as unreadable text. Noise characters in a data stream are displayed as gribble.”
The (biological) gribbles remind us of the very great extent and importance of biodiversity as sources of bioactive natural products. Leaving aside enzymes and other biologicals, a large fraction of marketed pharmaceuticals are based on or find their origins in natural products, and there is continuing interest in exploiting them. A recent summary shows also that they were as successful as those derived from physico-chemical considerations alone, possibly because successful marketed drugs and natural products are more like metabolic intermediates than are purely synthetic molecules. Genome mining is capable of providing clues to novel natural products even when these have not been previously observed in extracts or cultures of the producer organism. Mutasynthesis provides a means of modifying them when they have. Food security is a major issue on which I shall blog soon. However, from bioenergy to enzymes to drugs, we depend on the natural world for considerably more products than just food. The BSBEC will provide an important focus for some of these.
- Challis, G. L. (2008). Genome mining for novel natural product discovery. J Med Chem 51, 2618-28
- Dobson, P. D., Patel, Y. & Kell, D. B. (2009). “Metabolite-likeness” as a criterion in the design and selection of pharmaceutical drug libraries. Drug Disc Today 14, 31-40
- Ganesan, A. (2008). The impact of natural products upon modern drug discovery. Curr Opin Chem Biol 12, 306-17
- Harvey, A. L. (2008). Natural products in drug discovery. Drug Discov Today 13, 894-901
- Koehn, F. E. & Carter, G. T. (2005). The evolving role of natural products in drug discovery. Nat Rev Drug Discov 4, 206-20
- Newman, D. J. & Cragg, G. M. (2007). Natural products as sources of new drugs over the last 25 years. J Nat Prod 70, 461-77
- Powell, A., Borg, M., Amir-Heidari, B., Neary, J. M., Thirlway, J., Wilkinson, B., Smith, C. P. & Micklefield, J. (2007). Engineered biosynthesis of nonribosomal lipopeptides with modified fatty acid side chains. J Am Chem Soc 129, 15182-91
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1 comment to 'A virtual centre for second-generation bioenergy research'
Dear Professor Kell,
As a member of the Instution of Agricultural Engineers, I received a copy of your publication “The Bioscience behind BBSRC” with the Instution’s latest magazine.
Since the main focus of my work is in Post-Harvest activities, I was rather disappointed to see that the work of the BBSRC in food security appears to deal only with increasing production and productivity and apparently ignores post-harvest storage.
I am convinced that on the world scale, vast resources could be saved by improving the effectiveness and efficiency of post-harvest storage, transport and processing operations. The rate of return from improving storage operations is, in my opinion, many times greater than that from improving yields by introducing improved seeds and agricultural practices. The time scale for achieving these benefits is also potentially much shorter.
Over the past 18 years, I have worked in some 20 countries and I have witnessed and measured wastage of crops [primarily grains and oilseeds] on a vast scale. India admits to losing 21 million tons of wheat annually in addition to some 40 million tons of fruits and vegetables annually. Presumably all of these crops were grown with increasingly scarce water and increasingly expensive nitrogenous fertilisers. I have measured post harvest losses in cereals of more than 25% in Ukraine, amounting to another 12.5 million tons annually. I am sure that similar proportions are lost throughout all the former Soviet Republics. More is lost in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. All of this has been grown and transported using vast resources including water, fuel and labour.
The situation in the United Kingdom is not as healthy as we might wish. I investigate incidents for legal cases and insurance claims. My current case load includes 5 investigations involving the loss of over 20,000 tonnes of combineable crops stored under professional management. Yields need to be increased by a significant amount to compensate for the considerable quantities of food materials currently being thrown away by deficiencies in existing storage systems.
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