THE WHOLE TRUTH ABOUT TERMITES

RESEARCH::Scientists studying the wood boring insects intestines fine a potential source of biofuels.

A team of US scients poring over the intestines of a tropical termite have a gut feeling that a breakthrough in the quest for cleaner renewable fuel is in store

Tucked in the termites nether regions they say is a treasure trove of enzymes that could make next generation biofuels replacing fossil fuels that are dirty pricey or laden with geopolical risk.

Termites of course are typically a curse inflicting billions of dollars in damage each year by munching through household timber with silent relentless ease

But gene researchers say the hind gut of a species of Central american termite harbours a potential gold mine of microbes which exude enzymes to smoothly break down woody fibres and provide the insect with its nutrition

Present generation biofuels are derived from corn sugar and other crops whose starch is converted into ethanol by enzymes fermentation and distillation

One of the problems is that this product entails converting food into fuel. hefty US subsidies to promote bio ethanol has price repercussions across swathes of the global food market

next generation bio fuels though would use non food cellulose materials such as wood chips and straw. but these novel processes hampered by costs and complications are struggling to reach a commercial scale.

the termites tumy though could make all the difference

like cows termites have a series of intestinal compartments that each nurture a district community of microbes\

eacgh compartment does a different job in the process to convert woody polymers into the kind of sugars that can then be fermented into bio fuel

The US team has now sequenced and analysed the genetic code of some of these microbes in a key step towards, hopefully, reproducing the termites miniature bioreactor on an industrial scale. their work published wednesday in Nature, required scientists to venture into the rainforests of Costa Rica where they plucked bulbous headed worker termites from a large nest at the foot of a tree

using fine forceps and needles they extracted the contents of the third paunch or hind gut from 165 termites and sent this to a lab in california for sequencing.

from this, some 71 million letters of genetic code emerged pointing to two major bacterial lineages called fibrobacters which degrade cellulose and treponemes which convert the result to fermentable sugars

Termite guts are incredibly efficient said Andres Brune of the Max Planck Institute for terrestrial microbiology in Marburg Germany,.

In theory they could transform an a4 sized sheet of paper into two litres of hydrogen he said

WEddy Rubin director of the Joint Genome institute an organization that comes under the aegis of the US department of energy said an important fundamental step had been make even if a long road still lay ahead

scaling up this process so that biomass factories can produce bioguels more efficiently and economically is another story

Other scientists in the project were from the california institute of technology(Caltech), biofuels company Verenium Corp, the NationalBiodiversity Institute (INBIO) of Costa Rica and the IBM Thomas J Watson Research Centre