Alberta team trying to turn E. coli into fuel places at world competition

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - A University of Alberta team trying to turn E. coli into fuel has earned a first place finish in the energy category at an international genetic engineering competition at MIT. But the grand prize for the competition eluded them, going instead to a team from Peking University who wowed the judges with their efforts to program bacteria.

Justin Pahara, 23, a cell biologist and one of a 10-member team called the ButaNerds from the U of A who entered the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition, said they’re very excited about their first place win in the energy category.

“It shows us that we can compete on an international stage,” he said in an interview Sunday from the university campus in Cambridge, Mass. “We’re all just really excited to go home and continue the project.”

The competition was fierce, with 59 teams from universities around the world vying for top spot, including other Canadian university teams from Calgary, Lethbridge, Waterloo, Toronto and McGill, in Montreal. Using butanol, a biofuel that could one day replace ethanol, Pahara’s team is aiming to genetically engineer a new type of fuel using E. coli - though a much more harmless version than is found in feces. Butanol is an alcohol that can be burned just like gasoline.

There is already a bacteria that produces butanol, but it does it very inefficiently and it’s extremely hard to work with, said Pahara, who is in his first year of a master’s degree.

“The basic idea of our project is to take the system . . . and put it into a bacteria that is really easy to work with and is well studied and well known. We can manipulate the bacteria a lot more easily,” he said.

While the team hasn’t yet produced butanol, they’re hoping to do it in about a month. Shining some sunlight on the engineered bacteria should convert carbon dioxide in the bacteria into fuel, Pahara said. It’s less polluting than regular gasoline and less expensive than ethanol, which currently uses food crops like corn or barley to make biofuel.

“For the environment it’s pretty darn good,” Pahara said. “Not having to use food sources at other biofuels do. You’ll have more food for people nationally, internationally and in Third World countries,” he said. “It will also save millions and millions of dollars in energy costs. Butanol will be purified and separated out much, much easier than other alternative fuels such as ethanol.”

Pahara said tests they’ve run on a vehicle engine and an all-terrain vehicle look promising. Since the fermentation factories required to make this new fuel would be similar to those used to make ethanol, much of the energy producing infrastructure, like manufacturing plants and pipelines, would theoretically stay the same, he said. Andrew Hessel, a consultant with the Alberta Ingenuity Fund who helped teams from the U of A, the University of Calgary and the University of Lethbridge compete in the event, called it a great learning experience for the students.

“I think it’s a fantastic educational experience for the undergraduates,” he said, noting the MIT competition is the only one of its kind in the genetic engineering field. “This is a tremendous bootstrap to their careers.

All the Alberta teams satisfied the requirements of the competition, which included documenting their projects and making presentations at the event, so all received gold medals for that, Hessel said. According to its website, the goal of the iGEM is to try and engineer biological devices.

It asks students to design and build genetic machines by manipulating biological parts. In the last three years, teams attending the competition have pitched arsenic detectors for use in developing countries and ways to produce colour and photographs by manipulating bacteria.

© Canadian Press