9. Caldicellulosiruptor bescii
It’s a species of thermophilic, anaerobic bacteria, originally isolated from a geothermally heated freshwater pool in the Valley of Geysers on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia in 1990. If you’ If you thought “that’s Anaerocellum thermophilum – you get a gold star, but the bacterium was reclassified three years ago by a team that included the afore-mentioned Mike Adams.
A while back, a group of researchers led by the University of Georgia’s Mike Adams found that the bacterium that can, without pretreatment, break down biomass, including lignin, and release sugars for biofuels and chemicals production. The group writes in Energy & Environmental Science, “the majority (85%) of insoluble switchgrass biomass that had not been previously chemically treated was degraded at 78 °C by the anaerobic bacterium Caldicellulosiruptor bescii. Remarkably, the glucose/xylose/lignin ratio and physical and spectroscopic properties of the remaining insoluble switchgrass were not significantly different than those of the untreated plant material. C. bescii is therefore able to solubilize lignin as well as the carbohydrates and, accordingly, lignin-derived aromatics were detected in the culture supernatants.
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