Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from November, 2009

Journal Club:" Correlation of cellulase gene expression and cellulolytic acticity throughout the gut of the termite Reticulitermes flavipes."

It has been a while since the last contribution to this site. Today’s blog entry shall be a summary of a journal article that a couple of friends and I started recently to educate ourselves on topics related to bio-based ideas that are of interest to us. Recently, I came across a general article in the Scientist that talked about biofuels production. The article mentioned integrated biofuel productionpipelines that could include the breakdown of agricultural waste products containing cellulose . Cellulose is a complex sugar, meaning that it consists of long-chains of individual simple sugar units such as glucose . The glucose that is released from the breakdown of cellulose could be used for bioethanol production. But it turns out that cellulose is a very sturdy material that is difficult and energy intensive to break down. One way to reduce the cost of break-down would be to rely on enzymes that are known as biological catalysts. Catalysts can reduce the activation energy which is