microbes in the community

"summer's here and the time is right, for..." ...dancing in the streets 

attending garden parties and hearing all about microbes?

Ok, so that may never take off as a remake of the famous Motown hit, but nonetheless, this weekend saw a raft of garden parties, fêtes, school fayres and the like, full of festive folks enjoying the wonderful English summer, whilst supporting local good causes.

On Saturday and Sunday, the sun was shining brightly, the summer breeze was wafting gently and the stall at our local Old Town Festival event was well attended, with visitors eager to see what BUGS was all about, smell the difference between the untreated bran and the microbe-rich BUGS bran (which most people agreed smells like really strong salt and vinegar crisps, crossed with wheatabix!). The pictures of worm nests drew particular interest, yet although most people claimed to be squeamish, not one turned the page to avoid the close-up pictures but instead bent forward, looked more closely and asked all sorts of intelligent and interesting questions about what it was they were looking at. (more to follow on that subject, over the next few blog posts, given it proved so popular)

We gave away samples of microbe brews, for those interested to try for themselves, we spoke about peak oil and what this would mean for food growing in the future (if we can't afford the rising cost of synthetic Nitrogen, how exactly are we going to feed ourselves?) as well as the even more troubling concept of peak phosphor, given that whilst Nitrogen at least can be synthesized, phosphor can't be.

All in all, visitors to the stall were interested, engaged and wanted to know more, even though not all those attending grew organically. Hopefully we gave those we saw something new to think about and encouraged some to think about what they might do to start growing food for themselves, organically (and with the help of beneficial microbes).

At various points during the afternoon, those attending the garden fête gathered around to hear a variety of speakers give presentations, which the organisers had arranged. Nobody had expected a talk all about "the fascinating world of micro-organisms" but there it was - like a living example of the nerd in the yakult advert (you know the one - that poor nerdy chap who talks endlessly about bacteria and who pretty girls avoid at all the hippest parties) waxing lyrical about the role of beneficial microbes and what they can do for plant and human well-being.

Contrary to expectations, the talk went down rather well (who'd have thunk!) with many listeners making a bee-line for the stall to learn more and see what it was all about in greater detail.  One illustrative graphic was employed, showing the scale of the microbial world under discussion.  In fact, the graphic (see below) set the scene in describing the otherwise hidden world, bringing it to the light of day and into the focus of attention.

So when otherwise trivial facts emerged from the talk, such as the fact that, in a typical teaspoon of garden soil, there are approximately 5,000,000 bacteria - it became a figure not entirely meaningless, but an illustration of just how diverse and biologically active this hidden world beneath our feet really is.

Other fascinating facts, such as the mind-boggling statement that over 90% of the cells in our bodies are actually bacteria, carried real weight. Here in this blog (and in the "about this blog" page), we've referred to the fact that as a society we've been conditioned to think of bacteria as products purely of disease, of illness and of harm.  Now, taking the above graphic into consideration and coupled with that 90% bacteria by volume factoid, do you still think it's all about disease?  Hopefully not... and hopefully the door is opening on seeing bacteria as a natural part of who we are and what we are, as creatures who are partners to an invisible army of allies.

The soil food web is a subject we've yet to cover in depth in this blog, but as is the case with the above 90% of our bodily system factoid, so is the case within the soil - bacteria (and other microbes) form the foundation for an entire mini-ecosystem of partnership, of beneficial biological action that unbeknown to us humans at our scale, nevertheless benefits us in ways we simply can't perceive - or at least not without the help of tools such as powerful microscopes.

So, in summary, the sun shone, the breeze wafted gently and in one small corner of traditional English culture, science, tea and home-made cakes mixed to create an eclectic diversion for those in attendance.

living foundries - the new future with microbes?

As the name suggests, "Living Foundries" are the bacterial and fungal colonies which can produce a new generation of human resources, with a low environmental impact.

Aside from new uses in supplying phosphor and nitrogen for truly sustainable farming, one farming input which can't be solved with microbes is fuel.  Whether we like it or not, bacteria can't just eat sugars and secrete petroleum products into the tractors, combines and delivery trucks to supply us truly sustainable foods - or can they?

it seems they might just be able to.

for some time, research has been ongoing into the possibility of pressing oils from algae

but now bio-engineers in the USA are taking the idea of living foundries further - by engineering e-coli to excrete diesel directly.  A guardian interview asked Jay Keasling, a professor of bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley and CEO of the US Department of Energy's Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) about his previous successes manufacturing anti-malaria drugs using "living foundries" before asking him about his new biodiesel bugs:


How easy is it to make fuel from microbes?
About a year ago, we published a paper in Nature where we engineered E. coli to produce a diesel fuel. The beauty of it was that the E. coli took in the sugar, transformed it directly into diesel, and the diesel was secreted outside the cell. Because it's oily, the diesel floats to the top. So unlike ethanol, which you have to distil to get it pure enough to use in an engine, the diesel purifies itself. That reduces the cost and the amount of energy needed to make it.

Will your diesel be as good as the fuel at the pump?
It's as good, if not better. Fuel is incredibly complicated – it has many different components and it's optimised for different things. We can build the fuel from the most valuable molecules, so we don't have the unwanted components that existing fuels have. You get better gas mileage out of it and cleaner emissions. And we're talking about a substantial improvement for the environment. Our diesel reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 80%, which is pretty substantial.

The world uses around 90 million barrels of oil a day. How can bugs compete?
We're looking at replacing 30% of transportation fuel in, say, a 20- to 30-year period. That is a huge undertaking. We are going to develop the technology to make the fuels and license them out. In the next 10 to 20 years, we'll see a very diverse range of companies all working with different techniques to make fuels.

How will your work affect the giant oil companies?
The energy business is the biggest sector in the world, and the beauty about working in the biggest industry on the planet is that there is room for everybody. Exxon is the largest company in the US, but it has only 5% of the transportation fuel market. That alone tells you that anybody can play.

Will synthetic biology be used to make more than fuels?
As well as fuels, we are looking at everything else we produce from petroleum, including polymers and plastics, and asking: can we go in and replace those? I don't see any reason why we can't make almost any chemical we want from sugar, a renewable resource. It's a great time to be in biology and biotechnology, because we have so many more tools and it's so much more powerful than it used to be.

Jay Keasling believes he can create alternatives to diesel and jet fuel using synthetic biology.
Photograph: Roy Kaltschmidt/Lawrence Berkeley Nat'l Lab

a future-facing convention regarding living foundries is to be held soon.

in the mean-time, we wait with baited breath at what other uses bugs will be put to, in terms of the immense environmental service they can provide.