A U.S. biotechnologist says that in the near future, people would be able to get benefit from the excess of carbon dioxide present in the atmosphere. The extra amount of CO2 in the atmosphere can be used as a source of fuel.
Many scientists have been working on finding out easiest and cheapest way to convert CO2 into various useful applications.
Finally, Prof. Michael Adams and his team at the University of Georgia have come up with a method which will help in transforming the carbon dioxide trapped in the atmosphere into various useful products.
According to the result, greenhouse gases which trap the sun rays and raise the global temperature and eventually responsible for the global warming on earth can now be used for the creation of biofuels which are environment- friendly.
They created a microorganism which absorbs the carbon dioxide which is present in the atmosphere and produces something useful same as plants do.
Usually, plants convert water and carbon dioxide into sugars in the presence of sunlight as catalyst. This sugar is present in the complex cell structure of the plant which provides them energy and it can also be fermented into fuels like ethanol. But, it very difficult to convert sugars into the fuel efficiently.
In this new method of producing fuel from the carbon dioxide, they removed the role of plants which is acting as intermediate because growing plants and then extracting sugar from their biomass is a very complex and inefficient process. Rather, they used distinct microorganism called Pyrococcus furiosus to covert CO2 into useful products which also include fuel.
They did some manipulation in the genes of this organism so that it can be fed at much lower temperature on carbon dioxide and then generate many useful industrial products as byproduct.
By Ruchi Singh
reporter
Park Sae-jin
swatchsjp@ajunews.com