From Boston Globe

Scientists have engineered baker's yeast to produce ethanol faster and more efficiently, according to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology research paper published today.

The government is urging greater use of ethanol as a way to stretch domestic motor fuel supplies and make the country less dependent on foreign oil. US demand for ethanol has also jumped as the oil industry uses it to replace gasoline additive MTBE, a suspected carcinogen.

The MIT scientists made "super" baker's yeast, by adding a gene already found in the microbe, to speed up ethanol production by about 50 percent. That could allow ethanol plants either to make more of the fuel in less time, or make more of the fuel in the same time, said Dr. Hal Alper, one of authors of the paper, published in the journal Science.

The mutated yeast could help move US ethanol production beyond its current centralized location in the Midwest to areas across the country. That's because it can more efficiently ferment either corn starch, currently the main source of ethanol made in the United States, or the sugars in woody bits of plants, which are sometimes wasted.

The latter, along with switchgrass, poplar, and other sources, collectively known as biomass, can yield a new type of the fuel called cellulosic ethanol.

Currently no commercial US plants make cellulosic ethanol, though research plants have been built in other countries. Cellulosic currently costs up to three times as much as conventional ethanol, but backers say costs will come down as production rises.

The MIT scientists engineered the baker's yeast to survive high levels of ethanol and sugars found in the processing of the fuel that kill other fermenting microbes. "The end result is that you have yeast cells that are able to survive and grow in the presence of a toxic chemical," said Alper.

The research was funded by the DuPont-MIT alliance, a collaboration between the DuPont Co. and the university, the National Institutes of Health, the US Department of Energy, and others.