Biofules for fools

The key to the making of Biofules, or an alternative source of energy, Is the reaction of cellobiase breaking down cellobiose to make cellulosic ethanol, which some argue is a more sustainable fuel to replace petroleum. Due to ever increasing environmental problems and decrease in supply of traditional gas fuel sources we as people must find an array of alternative fuel sources and biotechnology is one of the most promising fields. Enzymes are very important in the process of making Biofules, they speed up the rate of the chemical reactions by positioning th3e substrate in such a way that the transition state is stabilized. The more enzyme you have the faster the process gets completed. Biofules can be used in everyday industry and for practical uses. The biofuel industry uses cellulases to convert cellulose in plant cell walls to sugars such as glucose. The sugar converts to ethanol by microbial fermentation which can then be placed into the engines to power cars and such.


The purpose of this lab was basically to see how fast the enzymes worked and at various times but the reaction into a stop solution to see how far or how "yellow" the reaction had come along. We take Cellulose and the Cellbiase breaks down the cellbose into more glucose which can then be transfered to the alternative substrate which produces glucose and PNitro Phenol. The stop solution is a strong base that kills the cellbiase and turns the pnitro yellow. On the second day instead of using a direct enzyme we used something from nature that should be a perfect substitute for enzymes, mushrooms. The mushrooms should behave the same as the enzymes. My hypothesis is that with each time we put the reaction into the stop solution it would have achieved a new level of "yellowness" or that it is further along in its reaction even with the mushrooms.


We observed that for the most part the experiment went according to plan and the stop soultion got more yellow with each time. The controls in this experiment were the start tube and end tube which had a considerable difference in color by the end of the reaction. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2umFeQmP0G4


Some possible sources of error might include not waiting long enough before each time to put the reaction into the stop solution. A real error was that in tube #2 we added 500ml instead of 250ml of the stuff from the reaction tube. Because we added twice the required amount the reaction showed to be twice as yellow than was expected because there was 2x the amount of product. However, like in the day 1 results the amount of product gradually increased showing that the mushroom extract was a good source of enzyme. (all of the other tubes [#1,-,3,4,5,6] had the correct amount of reaction solution added to them.)