My Nerd Job: biofuels and shipworms (2009.05.15)

So we just got samples today of shipworms for single cell micromanipulation. Why in the world would anyone be interested in shipworms and their symobiotic bacteria? These little worms are extremely good at breaking down wood and the reason they are good at breaking down wood is the bacteria that associate with their gill structure produce cellulases that degrade cellulose, a major component of wood. If you can degrade wood into into component sugar you can ferment it and turn it into a stiff drink or a biofuel. Possibly enzymes from these bacteria could lead us away from using corn and other food stocks as feed stocks for a biofuel infrastructure in the US, not to mention that most of plant biomass is cellulose so having access to it would greatly increase the effeciency that we could take a crop and turn it into fuel.

Lore has it that Columbus got an extra year long stay in the Bahamas because shipworms ate up his boat so bad that he could not sail back to Europe until all the wood had been repaired.

So here is the process (Hands are Dan our collaborator):

1) Capture a worm from a piece of wood. The worm is right at the tip of dental tool


2)Dissect the worm to get out its gill where the bacteria associate



3)Pulverise the gill to free up the bacteria. Below is the gill aparatus:



4) Look at the bacteria under the microscope:



5) Capture singe bacteria:



6) Lyse open the cell to get the DNA and amplify it.
7) Sequence the DNA and find gene for cellulases

Down the Road:
8) industrialize the cellulases for use at biofuel plants
9) Drive down US consumption of foreign oil. Create a fuel that cycles carbon instead of digging out of the ground and putting it in the air.