Scrappy soil bacteria crowned bioenergy champ
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Who doesn’t love a Cinderella story?
In a Final Four like no other, scientists from the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center met Tuesday in the Wisconsin Energy Institute to represent four tiny yet mighty bioenergy champions.
The federally-funded research center, headquartered at UW–Madison, does basic science to support the development of sustainable biofuels and products made from non-food plants grown on what farmers often call marginal lands – fields that aren’t generally suitable for food crops.
There are many ways to turn plant fibers into valuable products like aviation fuel and plastics, but many of them rely on bacteria and yeasts that metabolize the plants’ carbon.
The center studies a variety of these microbes, each with different abilities.
For example, yeasts and bacteria such as Zymomonas mobilis generate their energy through fermentation, which produces alcohol.
Other bugs convert ringed hydrocarbon molecules (known as aromatics) into molecules like PDC and muconic acid, which are building blocks for many types of plastics, as well as isoprenoids, a class of compounds used to make medicines, flavorings, and cosmetics. GLBRC scientists have rewired one to make multiple products at the same time.
Kevin Myers, a computational biologist with the center and sports fan, had often mused about which bug would come out on top in a competition, but for all their versatility, microbes aren’t very good at basketball.
So the WEI staff organized a different sort of March Madness, bringing together scientist-coaches to pit their favorite microbes against each other as part of the institute’s Forward in Energy Forum series.
In one bracket there was Novosphingobium aromaticivorans, a bacterial newcomer that eats hydrocarbons and spits out petrochemical replacements versus the perennial fermentation favorite Saccharomyces cerevisiae, aka brewer's yeast.
The other bracket pitted the versatile and prolific fermenter Z. mobilis against the scrappy dirt-dweller Streptomyces.
The scientists, Morgan Davies (Saccharomyces), Avery Vilbert (Novo), Bailey Marshall (Zymo), and Caryn Wadler (Strep) introduced their bugs, explaining their biological basics and their roles in converting plants into low-carbon fuels and products traditionally derived from fossil fuels.
They fielded audience questions that ranged from curious (do you kill your microbes after each experiment) to practical (can your microbe handle mixed feedstocks) and whimsical (who's your microbe's arch enemy).
Then it was time for the audience to vote.
Novo won the first matchup on a coin-toss tiebreaker, while Strep dominated Zymo, on the strengths of its metabolic versatility: it eats every other bug's leftovers and can make an array of products, from isoprenoids to antibiotics.
The scientists answered a few more questions, like whether the bugs were dangerous (generally no, but they do use precautions to ensure they don't escape the labs) and which is the biggest (Saccharomyces, the only eukaryote in the bunch).
Final round voting came down to the wire, but Streptomyces pulled off another upset, winning by 2 votes to claim the championship.
As a Department of Energy research center, GLBRC’s mission is doing basic science to answer fundamental questions about biology and to provide industry with a menu of options to achieve their goals. So while there was only one tournament champion, Myers, wearing a striped referee jersey, summed it up: “You are all winners.”
Visit go.wisc.edu/microbial-madness to see replay of the tournament and learn more about these fascinating microbes and their potential to transform plants into the fuels and consumer products of the future.
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