Can you power your car with fungus?

Not yet but you may in the future. A team lead by Gary Strobel, the discoverer of the anticancer drug taxol, has found a fungus that produces what they call “myco-diesel.” The fungus, called Gliocladium roseum, was found in the branches from an ancient family of trees known as "ulmo" in the Patagonia rainforest.

"These are the first organisms that have been found that make many of the ingredients of diesel," said Strobel who is a Montana State University professor. "This is a major discovery."

From Cellulose Straight to Diesel

The list of hydrocarbons and hydrocarbon derivatives produced by Gliocladium roseum is quite diverse and includes heptane, octane, and benzene to name only a few. What’s also impressive is that it produced these hydrocarbons while growing in cellulose, one of the most common organic molecules on earth.

"The main value of this discovery may not be the organism itself, but may be the genes responsible for the production of these gases," Gary Strobel said. "There are certain enzymes that are responsible for the conversion of substrates such as cellulose to myco-diesel."

Further Studies Underway

Strobel's son, Scott, is a chairman of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor. He is a member of a team studying the fungus' genome. They plan to identify the genes responsible for its diesel-making properties. "The broader question is, what is responsible for the production of these compounds," Scott Strobel said. "If you can identify that, you can hopefully scale it up so you end up with better efficiency of production."

While, it may be a while before myco-diesel finds its way into your gas tank, Gliocladium roseum has already generated a lot of interest from government agencies and private industry looking for bio fuel alternatives other than ethanol.

If this fungus can make diesel like hydrocarbons it begs the question, are there other microbes that can do it even better?