Termites: Bane of Home Owners, Boon to Ethanol Production
Researchers at the University of Florida are reporting that the enzymes in the guts of termites could provide a powerful tool for making ethanol from non-food woody plants.
In an upcoming review paper, professor Michael Scharf details how termites — which cause hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to houses in the US alone each year — might actually prove useful for something that most people could never have envisioned.
Through millions of years of evolution, termites have filled a niche in the animal world that takes precise chemical coordination between the digestive enzymes and microbes in their guts to turn the wood that they eat into sugars which can then be used to “fuel” the termite.
It is this seemingly easy transformation of wood into sugar in the termite guts that holds the promise for future ethanol production, because, once you have the sugar, it’s easy to make ethanol through fermentation.
