Termites!

I just flipped through this paper on termites out of CalTech and its full of pretty interesting stuff.

I never knew that termites required an army of 200+ different bacteria species to actually digest the wood they eat. The termite itself doesn't digest the wood, the armada of different bacteria do. Its symbiotic. Apparently, neither could exist without the other. These bacteria species have largely been hiding out in the guts of termites for millions of years so we never knew much about them.

However, the paper author is taking a look at these termite specific critters with an eye towards some genetic mods that might allow termites to become a more efficient biofuel source than corn, sugar cane, etc such which are apparently very wasteful. Within, you find out that it takes 4 gallons of water during refinery processing to crank out a gallon of ethanol.

The paper is in PDF format so you'll need Adobe Reader to read it. Worth a look though and the guy's writing style is pretty accessible to anyone with a modest amount of science background. I've had a year of college biology and a couple of years of chem/o-chem and it wasn't over my head.

posted by Purp at 10:13 PM

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