[Graeme]

Designer organisms could be world's next fuel source

The scientist who cracked the human genome now hopes to exploit the properties of DNA to solve the world's pending energy crisis.

J. Craig Venter, who gained worldwide fame in 2000 when he mapped the human genetic code, is behind a new start-up called Synthetic Genomics, which plans to create new types of organisms that, ideally, would produce hydrogen, secrete nonpolluting heating oil or be able to break down greenhouse gases.

CNET

[MacG]

I'm pretty sure it will work. In making him richer that is.

[shakespear1]

Yes. Then the little thng will mute to a feline virous. In that case we will have the chickens and the cats going after us and taking over the world.

[Revi]

Even if they do work, their original fuel source will have to come from either solar, lunar, geothermal, nuclear or fossil fuel energy. What do you feed these critters to give them enough energy to make hydrogen? It will have to be some kind of energy source. Maybe the conversion ratio is better than other forms of energy producers.

[thor]

Even if they do work, their original fuel source will have to come from either solar, lunar, geothermal, nuclear or fossil fuel energy. What do you feed these critters to give them enough energy to make hydrogen? It will have to be some kind of energy source. Maybe the conversion ratio is better than other forms of energy producers.

Don't forget the 25+ years of continuing research before any sort of global deployment of these abominations becomes remotely possible.

[EnergySpin]

Nope,
It will not take 25 years. Craig Venter is being backed by the DOE. In 2004 CV toured the world giving lectures on the roadmap for his company Synthetic Genomics which he founded when he got fed up with Celera. When he quit Celera (a few months after the 2001 Nature publication of the Human Genome Map) he toured the worlds seas taking samples of marine micro-organisms with the intention to sequence and patent genes of enzymes in key metabolic pathways (nitrogen fixation, hydrogen synthesis, photosynthesis). He collected samples of thousands of micro-organisms (and he almost created an international episode when the French navy almost gunned him out of the French Polynesia waters) which were to be fed to the sequencers which had been sitting iddle since 2001 (the moment we finished HGP). The technical tools he is employing are probably mind blowing. From publications in Science, Nature and PNAS it can be gathered that they have achieved an order to two orders of magnitude improvement in the rate of solid phase DNA synthesis compared to the slow molecular cloning approach.
The theoretical tools come from computational system's biology and in fact have been the target of multiple calls for proposal from both the NSF (USA) and the FP6 (EU).
For the computationally literate here, his approach aims to do for genomic biology what Component Based approaches did to Software Engineering.
It will not take 25 years .... from what I have seen in the bioinformatics literature and from what I heard during one of the lectures he gave last year ... I'd bet they are looking for real estate now to place the photobioreactors and are trying to pre-emptively deal with the ethical issues that arise from making new life forms.
Energy will come from the sun .... directly captured by the micro-organisms with a longer term goal involving ecologies of micro-organisms in advanced bio-reactors. The latter will likely have to wait more than 10 years but not the former ....
I'm glad that Graeme put this at PO.com ... at least the 4-5 people here who have been exchanging PMs about this, can now come out of the closet

[CARVER]

These things have a tendancy to end up in nature somehow (usually by ignorence/mistake). In that case you better hope there is a natural enemy, otherwise we might have an organism that is spilling oil all over nature. I believe there are already cases of a modified algea or waterplant that was dumped in the mediterranean. Where it turned out it had no natural enemies there, it was poisonus. It spread like a fire. It took a while to find a natural enemy somewhere and introduce it in the 'infected' region.

I hope we will be a lot more careful with this!