As These Bacteria Eat, They Generate a Strange Molecule That Can be Used to Make Jet Fuel

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Aircraft are indispensable in the modern age for transporting people, delivering goods, and performing military operations, but the petroleum-based fuels that power them are in short supply. Scientists have now discovered a way to generate an alternative jet fuel by harvesting an unusual carbon molecule produced by the metabolic process of bacteria that are commonly found in soil. The research, by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, was published recently in the journal Joule.

[...] Keasling wanted to recreate a molecule called Jawsamycin, which is named after the movie Jaws" because of its bite-like indentations. It is generated by the common bacteria streptomyces, an organism that Cruz-Morales had worked with in the past.

The recipe already exists in nature," says Cruz-Morales. The jagged molecule is produced by native metabolism of the bacteria as they munch away on glucose. As they eat sugar or amino acids, they break them down and convert them into building blocks for carbon-to-carbon bonds," he says. You make fat in your body in the same way, with the same chemistry, but this bacterial process has some very interesting twists."

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