Reviews of Science for Science Librarians: Microbes that Make Biofuels and Work within Fuel Cells

Abstract

To date there is no “Swiss Army knife” biofuel microorganism that does it all, in part because science has yet to exhaust all the biomass conversion potential of the microbes about which it knows, and it recognizes that there are a great many microorganisms that could play a role in biofuels about which it knows nothing. Nonetheless, the microorganisms that science does know something about will often provide a baseline for comparisons, and knowing searchable binomial names and the biological families from which these more often studied microbes come will likely serve sci-tech librarians well in keeping their patrons better informed. We therefore inventoried the titles and keywords of the 50 most-cited and the 250 most-recent articles under the topic “Biofuels” in the Web of Science, looking for the searchable binomial names and biological classifications of microbes that make them. Although some microbes work synergistically with others and make multiple fuels, we found fungi, archaea, bacteria, and microalgae focused primarily as follows: bioethanol: Saccharomyces cerevisae and Trichoderma reesei; biogas: mixed-species colonies of Methanomicrobiales, Methanosarcinaceae, and Methanobacteriales; biobutanol: genetically engineered E. coli and Clostridium acetobutylicum; biofuel cells: Shewanella spp.; biodiesel: Chorella vulgaris, Botryococcus braunii, Nannochloropsis spp., and Scenedesmus obliquus.

KEYWORDS:

• biofuels
• bioethanol
• biomethane
• biodiesel
• microbial fuel cells