Re: [DIYbio] Re: Cyanobacteria+DIY bio

AFAIK there are no cyanobacteria that produce ethanol naturally. Nor
have I heard of any being engineered to produce ethanol; there'd be a
lot of work involved just making them survive ethanol, let alone produce
useful amounts.

What they *can* do out of the box is produce lots of oil, under the
right conditions. The main problem facing people who want to make
biodiesel in this way is that the conditions don't suit mass-production
yet. For example, many strains of algae and cyanobacteria will only
bother making lots of oil if their growth is constrained somehow but
energy is still available, conditions that lean towards "batch-mode"
production systems rather than a convenient continuous-flow system.

On 25/07/12 05:44, JOETHEJOEGUY wrote:
> i am also interested in cultivating cyanobacteria. does anyone know of a
> strain that produces a significant amount of ethanol, and preferably no
> other toxins?
>
> On Wednesday, October 19, 2011 8:05:00 PM UTC-7, PatrickG wrote:
>>
>> I was pondering the use of organisms in DIYbio, and I was wondering
>> what people think of the use of cyanobacteria in this field.
>> I see a few potential advantages:
>>
>> 1) They are autotrophic, so no worries about feeding them (maybe
>> this can help reduce contamination)
>> 2) Many are diazotrophic, so they can even use N2 (maybe a cool
>> DIY project can take advantage of this?)
>> 3) They live an en enormous variety of habitats, so we could use
>> alkaliphilic, thermophilic strains to even further reduce
>> contamination (or maybe for the fun of it), or we could use a
>> mesophilic strain
>> 4) While some produce toxins, I don't think any are pathogenic,
>> and we can try to avoid strains producing toxins.
>>
>> I can see some difficulties too, so it'd be cool to hear from anyone
>> experienced with this... I'm not quite sure if it's easy enough to
>> manipulate them.. (should be easy enough to culture them though). And
>> with the colloquial name "blue green algae" they shouldn't really stir
>> too much false alarm.
>>
>>
>> What does everyone here think?
>


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