Issue date: 3/26/08 Section: News

Media Credit: J. Patrick Clayton - THE BATTALION Dr. Thomas Wood measures the amount of hydrogen while conducting an experiment. [Click to enlarge]

Sometimes solutions can be found in the mostly unlikely places.

Imagine a world that no longer purchases oil from hostile countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East to power automobiles and heat homes, but instead replaces oil with hydrogen fuel produced by trillions of microscopic bacteria.

Texas A&M Professor Thomas Wood says that this world is entirely possible because he and his research team have successfully genetically manipulated Escherichia coli to produce hydrogen fuel from common sugar.

E. coli is commonly associated with food poisoning from uncooked meat, but the bacteria is also found naturally in the human body. Wood said that the average person has eight kilograms (17.6 pounds) of bacteria in their body at any given time. This bacteria naturally produces hydrogen to increase the pH of its surroundings for survival.

Wood has spent the previous 17 years manipulating the bacteria to do different things. "Many people think that engineered bacteria will take over the world, but they will not," Wood said.

E. coli has been used for many applications, from environmental cleanup to synthesizing indigo dye for blue jeans, and now E. coli has been made to generate hydrogen fuel.

Wood said that he was hooked on researching hydrogen two years ago. The biotechnology research community has only been pursuing research in hydrogen production from bacteria for the past five years; all of these major breakthroughs have come about in a relatively short period of time.

Wood said that his research group initially started out with the wrong assumptions, but once the research settled its focus on E. coli, progress began moving along rapidly.

"We have used a process called DNA shuffling, in which we separate and re-splice E. coli genes in random sequences. We eventually found a combination which produced more hydrogen," Wood said. "I have made so many mistakes in my life, I thought this time I should make a living out of it."

Continued...

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