Gene from Cow’s Stomach Engineered to Create More Affordable Biofuel
As we pointed out in an earlier posting, one of the problems with biofuels such as corn-based ethanol is that they are diverting food crops from food source to fuel source. Miriam Sticklen, a crop and soil scientist from Michigan State University, announced this week that she has used an enzyme from a cow’s stomach to create a new strain of corn.
This new kind of corn, in an ideal scenario, would allow the kernels to be used as food, while the (formerly) wasted part of the corn plant could be converted to biofuel. A gene from a cow’s stomach, one of the most effective digesters of plant sugars in the world, is implanted into a corn cell using genetic engineering, fundamentally changing the corn plant. As reported in Biofuels Journal:
