My original Medium article lives here
CRISPR Solving the Energy Crisis: Creating Fuel for the Future? 🔋
CRISPR Solving the Energy Crisis: Creating Fuel for the Future?
CRISPR is a new gene-editing technology, that could be the solution to the energy crisis!
Its full name is: Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats.
It’s definitely received quite a bit of media coverage for it’s potential in gene editing, but what about its other capabilities?
For perhaps, biofuel?
An Overview of CRISPR 🦠 👩🔬
CRISPR is a DNA sequence found in the genomes of prokaryotic organisms, derived from previous virus DNA fragments used to find and remove similar viruses. Cas9 is a type of enzyme using the CRISPR sequence as a guide of what strands of DNA to remove. Together they form a tool capable of editing genes within organisms.
The Bioenergy Industry 🧫
CRISPR is revolutionizing research in every industry and the bioenergy industry is affected as well. Many even believe that CRISPR is the solution to the energy crisis in the near future. But first, let’s learn more about the industry…
What is Bioenergy ⚡
Bioenergy refers to renewable energy created from natural sources such as plant and animal byproducts. Being a sustainable energy source it’s definitely a step up from our current exhaustible sources. Bioenergy is generated from biomass, if we can increase biomass then bioenergy can become a valuable source.
How Biomass generates Bioenergy ⚙️
Biomass refers to organic matter such as wood or animal waste, it still retains energy from the Sun and when burned can release that energy as heat.
There are three ways to generate energy:
- Conversion to biofuel — converted into a fuel cell
- Conversion into biogas — methane from wet biomass, and syngas from dry biomass
- Direct burning — burned to produce heat and generate steam to turn a turbine
Today we’re focusing on biofuel.
How Biofuel is Made 🔋
Biofuel arises from a chemical process of fermentation. Biodiesel is created from a chemical reaction greases have with alcohol. With CRISPR we can change the genetic makeup of bacteria and algae to create a more efficient source of energy.
CRISPR’s Role in the BioEnergy Industry 🏭
Increasing Lipid Production in Algae 🧬
CRISPR can produce double the amount of biodiesel through algae optimization by changing the amount of lipid production. Researchers are using CRISPR to tweak and edit the genetic makeup of the algae to increase efficiency. They were able to disable some of the regulating factors for lipid production and starved the algae to increase the lipid production even further ending up with double the amount of lipid.
Helping Yeast Stay Healthy During Biofuel Production 🥗
Yeast is crucial to the fermentation of sugar in the production of biofuels. Yeasts are organisms commonly used in industrial production, but the stress gets to them too. Excessive metabolite or protein generation starts to impact the yeast and this is where CRISPR comes in. CRISPR has shown promising results in protecting the damage during the biofuel creation process, and allow the yeast to become tolerant of pre-treatment chemicals.
As the years go on, non-renewable resources are less and less of a viable option. Technology like CRISPR enables us to push ahead to the future and potentially even end the current energy crisis! 🔧
Key Takeaways 📌
- CRISPR is a new gene-editing technology, a DNA sequence found in the genomes of prokaryotic organisms
- Bioenergy refers to renewable energy created from natural sources such as plant and animal byproducts
- CRISPR can produce double the amount of biodiesel through algae optimization by changing the amount of lipid production