Hay - salt instead of gasoline

Gene engineers bring plants that will become energy carriers of future alcohol of plant origin more and more actively in competition with gasoline. The energy transfer of plants is still small. To increase it and identify other useful properties of plants, genetic engineering sets itself new tasks.

Vegetable ethanol can be used instead of gasoline or in a mixture with it. If the ratio of bioethanol and gasoline in fuel is 1 to 9, then it can be poured into any car today, and the prices for bioethanol are gradually reduced due to the achievements of gene engineers introducing new plants of plants, as well as innovations that reduce the cost of alcohol production.

Even avid critics of the transition to bioethanol recognize its strong side - environmental harmlessness. After all, it is based on the fermentation of sugars, for example in grain. In addition, plants are absorbed by carbon dioxide in ethanol before processing them. “It is difficult to resist the technology that helps to save the planet,” the editorial article of Nature Biotechnology magazine says.

But in order for the bioethanol to become a real alternative to gasoline, scientists must modify plant materials (sugarcane, corn, rapeseed, wheat, etc.), increase its energy production from each hectare of crops. While she is small. The report of the US Department of Energy says that even if the entire American wheat is put into ethanol, then only 15% of the gas consumption in the country will be able to replace the resulting volume of biofuel.

The question is how to process cellulose to free the energy of sugars. In modern production, a person simply adds enzymes to cellulose - amylase that contribute to sugar processing. Genetics want to ensure that the enzymes are already in the plant itself, which will be processed into raw materials. “Having changed the structure of the plant cell, you can get a full -fledged organism that can multiply from it. All the successes of genetic engineering are based on this property of plants, ”explains Dmitry Dorokhov, deputy director of the Bioengineering Center, RAS.

Scientists intend to implant into the plant a gene of amylazes, borrowed from the DNA of archebacteria - primitive unicellular organisms that live in hot sources. “Since the enzyme is thermal dependent, it withstands heating in thermal reactors and begins to induce, processing cellulose into sugar,” Dorokhov said.

Specialists of the American company Syngenta have set itself the task of bringing corn with an implanted amylase gene by 2008. Syngenta claims that modified corn is safe for human and animal health and that similar enzymes are included in saliva. However, activists of the Center for Food Safety Center in Washington indicate that this enzyme is not sufficiently studied and can cause allergies. They urge to abandon the experiment.

Another goal set by American geneticists is to reduce the content in corn going on bioethanol, lignin is a substances that causes plant linings, makes them solid and stable. Ligin makes it difficult to turn plant cellulose into ethanol. How will hydrolysis of cellulose with a reduced lignin content will have not yet been reported.

And again, ecologists against: plants changed by man will return to nature and begin to spread. And then we will witness how whole forests will fall due to a lack of lignin.

Dmitry Dorokhov believes that fighters for natural purity correctly draw the attention of scientists to a possible risk. But the biologist notes: only those plants are produced in open systems, whose biosopolinity is carefully checked. “Plants obtained in laboratories are not intended for commercialization. As part of a scientific project, a person receives a plant with the properties necessary for him. This process is associated with the acquisition of hundreds of thousands of transformers, but units that are most similar to the original plant are selected from them. Then the tests of a new sample on biofoe safety begin - how it will function not in the laboratory, but in open systems. This process is longer and expensive than the very obtaining a new plant. Moreover, each is studied separately. And only after this, the plant is given a certificate that it is biologically safe and it can begin its commercialization, ”Dorokhov explains.

There is another way to produce biofuel - from plant oil, such as rapeseed or soy. According to the American Academy of Sciences, the effectiveness of biofuel obtained from oil, so far exceeds the effectiveness of its analogue from alcohol. Now Europe is the task of bringing the volume of oil in diesel fuel to 15%.

When switching to biofuels, people will need huge areas that future energy carriers will occupy. They will have to be posted from crop rotation. To avoid acute disadvantage in grain crops, it is proposed to use plant waste - bark, straw, etc.

“Although scientists stated that the problem of the transition to biofuel should be solved, I did not hear about Russian developments in this area. True, it was said about the construction of two Russian factories - for the production of biofuels from ethanol and oil, but on a country's scale this is extremely few, ”complains Dmitry Dorokhov.

09/25/2006 / Galina Antonova, the material was published in the "newspaper" No. 174 dated 09/26/2006.