HOW BIOCHEMISTRY AND MOLECULAR BIOLOGY IS CONTRIBUTING TO BIO-ECONOMY.

Hey guys, My name is Expery and as I mentioned in the About us page, I will be talking more about the biochemistry and the molecular biology field. Well I know most of you are familiar with the petroleum based economy that controls almost everything in this world. But as much as it important for our survival, we have to understand that it is very harmful to our health. These type of economy becomes harmful to our health when industries using the petroleum products and chemicals from the petroleum are expelled to the atmosphere.

(Photo by wonderisland)

(Photo by: James Jordan)

                   






Today, I want to give insights on the possibility that we can shift from a petroleum based economy to a bio-economy which is not as harmful as the latter. For us to change our focus to the bio-economy, we definitely need a source of sufficient energy to run big companies and produce agricultural chemicals that would otherwise be produced from refining petroleum. After researching more about this topic both from my classes and scientists' articles, I learnt that plant cell wall can actually produce a sufficient amount of sugar which can be converted through biological processes to produce various products like bio-fuels, bio-medical drugs and even motorcycle tyre. The reason most scientists think that the plant cell wall will be the best source of our sugar is because most part of it is comprised of cellulose and that by converting the cellulose to sugar, we won't be competing with the food production by the plant.  As much as this sounds like a perfect idea, Dr. Curtis Wilkerson and his team of researchers believe that it also has its own drawbacks which are; there is a possibility that the production of the raw materials might/will be limited to protect the rain forest from depletion. Secondly, extracting the sugar from the plant cell wall is currently challenging because the cell walls have very rigid lignin that inhibit the digestibility of the cellulose.

(Photo from: Research gate)

To overcome this specific challenge, Dr. Wilkerson in his lab have identified the enzyme responsible in producing the compound from the corn that will weaken the lignin to enable digestibility of the cellulose. They identified the FMT activity to be pronounced in the transgenic poplar plant and they produced the p-coumarate(PMT) enzyme in the Poplar plant which produced the same compound that will weaken the lignin in the plant cell walls. They have since planted more transgenic poplar plants to generate sufficient amount of the compound and at the same time produce a surplus amount of sugar for the bio-economy.
I am certain that scientists will identify a perfect plant with the genes to produce the PMT enzyme and a plant that will be able to produce a sufficient amount of sugar to drive the bio-economy. Recently, Christopher Voigt, a scientist from MIT created a software that will be used by biologists to determine the perfect gene for whatever they will be interested in.
I have hopes for a better and clean environment that will not be a threat to my health. All of you should hope too because science is soon making our lives easy.
I hope this post helped you understand this research that has been going on for years.

pacific environment, Fossilfuels,http://pacificenvironment.org/energy-fossil-fuels

Expery.