An Engineered Microbial Platform for Direct Biofuel Production from Brown Macroalgae

Abstract

Sourced from Seaweed Using seaweed as a raw material for biofuels has received relatively little attention, in part because their primary sugar constituent, alginate, is not readily fermented by industrially tractable microbes. Wargacki et al. (p. 308 ; see the cover) now demonstrate that metabolically engineered bacteria can degrade seaweed and subsequently ferment the sugars into ethanol at laboratory scale.