An enzyme, discovered by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the U.S. Department of Energy Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), has the possibility of creating renewable alternative to petroleum-based toluene that’s microbial based.
Toluene is a gasoline octane booster with a market of 29 million tons annually worldwide.
The enzyme was discovered during a JBEI study to find renewable resources for industrial and commercial fuels and chemicals that are currently petroleum based.
Researchers studied two groups of microbes, one from sewage sludge and one from lake sediment.
The enzyme, phenylacetate decarboxylase, is a glycyl radical enzyme (GRE). GREs were first identified in the 1980s. They catalyze chemically challenging reactions and many occur inside the human intestine.
“All enzyme discovery projects are challenging,” Harry Beller, Berkeley Lab senior scientist and scientific lead at JBEI, said. “But moving from discovery in a single bacterial species to discovery in a complex microbial community from sewage sludge or lake sediments, was more difficult by orders of magnitude. This study became a needle-in-a-haystack search for the toluene-producing enzyme in a candidate pool of hundreds of thousands of enzymes.”
The enzyme makes it the first time a hydrocarbon biofuel will be produced by microbes.
Results were published in the journal Nature Chemical Biology.