Biofuels, solar and wind are still in the proof-of-concept stage, they rely heavily on mandates and subsidies, but most people would be surprised to learn that the area closest to being a realistic replacement for gasoline is biofuels.
Though ethanol makes for campaign promises, bacteria and other biological organisms can be genetically modified to produce larger amounts of fuel for renewable energy. Computer scientists recently created mathematical models of organisms to better predict how they can be engineered to produce desirable products.
The software, called MOST (Metabolic Optimization and Simulation Tool) can build mathematical models and perform analysis, but is simple to use because it employs spreadsheet style editing functions that are more user friendly than other software tools.
“We’re able to modify the organisms mathematically to see how they can produce the products we want, like biofuels,” says Jim Kelley, a chemistry graduate now getting a degree in computer science. “By removing certain genes, we can determine how much more of a certain chemical the organism will produce, thus providing us with valuable renewable fuels.”
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“We want to use microorganisms as chemical factories, but doing that is pretty hard,” says Desmond Lun, an associate professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science at Rutgers–Camden, whose past research has focused on how to alter the genetic makeup of E. coli bacteria to produce biofuel. “The core question is how you modify the organism. We can test these possibilities very quickly using a computer and this program can tell us what genes to knock out to get what we want.
“Computational modeling is important to genetic engineering and we already know a lot about the genetics of organisms. Programs like this one will help us manipulate them, creating a new way of producing energy.”
Reference: “MOST: A Software Environment for Constraint-based Metabolic Modeling and Strain Design,” upcoming in Bioinformatics.
