Saturday 16 November 2013

Bacteria engineered to produce GASOLINE fuel

Modern civilisation depends on fossil fuel, we need them to provide energy to power our cars, heat our homes and even to make medicinal products. Simply put life as we know it today will be very different without fossil fuels.

The only problem is that fossil fuels will not last forever..so there is an intense race to find renewable sources of fuel.

One remarkable approach to this problem is to re-engineer bacteria to produce petrol (gasoline). Bacteria can be re-wired to do this by modifying their genes.

Two South Korean scientists reported in Nature a method for modifying E. coli bacteria to produce petrol and other hydrocarbons that can be used for fuel.

They interfered in the normal metabolism of E. coli by deleting certain genes and enhancing the activity of others to transform the E. coli bacteria into a mini gasoline production unit!

Here is the set up they used to ferment the bacteria and collect the gasoline

Machine that was used to ferment the engineered E. coli and to collect the gasoline. Source: 
Nature 502, 571–574.

The engineered strains could produce roughly 589 mg of petrol per litre.

Imagine one day, we could generate petrol in the laboratory instead of relying on oil drilled from unstable Middle Eastern countries. Thus, would stablise fuel prices and even reduce unnecessary wars over oil!

The HIIT exercise protocol according to Little and co-workers (2009)

I have been interested in High Intensity Interval training (HIIT) ever since I have read the Tabata et al., 1996 paper on HIIT (Med Sci Sports Exerc. 1996 Oct;28(10):1327-30.)

I have summarised the protocol and results from the famous study performed by Little et al., 2009  (J Physiol. 2010 Mar 15;588(Pt 6):1011-22. Epub 2010 Jan 25. ). 

This protocol is more practical than the original Tabata study as no specialised exercise equipment is needed. 

Subjects underwent HIIT for 3 times a week (monday, wednesday, and friday).

Prior to training, each subject underwent 3 minutes cycling at medium intensity.

The subjects started off with 8 high intensity intervals for the first 2 weeks,  

The next 2 weeks, the intervals was increased to 10, then the next 2 weeks they were increased to 12 intervals.

Each high intensity interval was for 60 seconds, followed by 75 second low intensity exercise.

The results were interesting:


Enzymes linked to improved muscle performance and increased metabolism and genes involved in glucose usage in the muscle were elevated significantly.