Scientists Discover How to Create Gasoline with E. Coli

Could we power our cars with microorganisms? It may just be possible. Scientists have successfully produced 580 mg of gasoline per liter of cultured broth by converting in vivo generated fatty acid.

Gasoline is usually used as fuel for transportation. It's a mixture of hydrocarbons, additives and blending agents. The hydrocarbons, called alkanes, consist only of carbon and hydrogen atoms. In all, gasoline has a combination of straight-chain and branched-chain alkanes. While researchers have managed to engineer long-chain alkanes suitable for replacing diesel with bacteria, though, there have been few results when it comes to engineering short-chain alkanes, which could substitute gasoline.

In order to create short-chain alkanes, the researchers turned to Escherichia coli (E. coli). They engineered the fatty acid metabolism to provide the fatty acid derivatives that are shorter than normal intracellular fatty acid metabolites. In addition, they introduced a novel synthetic pathway for the biosynthesis of short-chain alkanes. This created a platform E. coli strain that was capable of producing gasoline.

"It is only the beginning of the work towards sustainable production of gasoline," said Sang Yup Lee, one of the researchers, in a news release. "The titre is rather low due to the low metabolic flux towards the formation of short-chain fatty acids and their derivatives. We are currently working on increasing the titre, yield and productivity of bio-gasoline. Nonetheless, we are pleased to report, for the first time, the production of gasoline through the metabolic engineering of E. coli, which we hope will serve as a basis for the metabolic engineering of microorganisms to produce fuels and chemicals from renewable resources."

The findings are important for the growth of bioengineered fuel sources. If researchers can make engineered E. coli a viable and cost-effective option for gasoline, the entire industry could benefit. That said, it will take quite some time before anything like that happens. The process is still being done on a small scale and it's currently not a cost-effective way of producing gasoline.

The findings are published in the journal Nature.