Tag: soil

Enzyme discovered from Brazilian biodiversity can revolutionize bio-refineries

Enzyme discovered from Brazilian biodiversity can revolutionize bio-refineries

Unprecedented enzyme class prospected in Brazilian soil can increase biorefinery efficiency and accelerate the sustainable production of energy and chemicals

A new enzyme class discovered in Brazilian soil represents one of the main advances in recent decades in the field of sustainable production of energy and chemicals. This enzyme is capable of accelerating the cellulose breakdown, a critical process in the production of bioenergy and biochemicals. This discovery, published in the journal Nature, was led by researchers from CNPEM (Brazilian Center for Research in Energy and Materials, in Campinas) in a partnership with researchers from INRAE (French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment, at Aix Marseille University) and Technical University of Denmark (DTU).

This enzyme was identified from the genetic material of a microbial community found in biomass residues collected in Brazilian soils. Its novel mechanism of action, combined with the ability to generate its own co-substrate, makes it a powerful tool for plant biomass deconstruction.

“This discovery changes the paradigm of cellulose degradation in nature and has the potential to revolutionize biorefineries”, says CNPEM researcher Mario Murakami, responsible for leading the studies. “With CelOCE, we can envision new routes for bioenergy, biochemicals and biomaterials production from plant biomass, contributing to a bio-based, low-carbon and circular economy.”

CelOCE (Cellulose Oxidative Cleaving Enzyme) improves efficiency in breaking down biomass into glucose, an essential step to convert this raw material into bioenergy and biochemicals. This research spanned from bioprospection in nature to an industrially relevant scale, with validation at the CNPEM pilot plant.

Data under industrial conditions have shown that, when used together with enzymes already used in the industry, CelOCE increased the amount of glucose released by up to 21% from agro-industrial residues. This means higher productivity and less waste in the industrial process.

According to ANP (Brazilian National Agency for Petroleum, Natural Gas and Biofuels) data, Brazil produced 43 billion ethanol liters in 2023. With this discovery, production can increase by billions of liters, using agro-industrial residues such as sugarcane bagasse, corn straw, wood and other crops, without needing to expand planting areas. However, the exact volume of this increase cannot yet be determined, as it depends on the amount of residues that will be used for ethanol production.

The research was carried out by a multidisciplinary team of scientists from CNPEM and international institutions from countries such as France and Denmark. According to CNPEM’s General Director, Antonio José Roque da Silva, the combination of advanced techniques available at the Center, including X-ray crystallography at Sirius, Brazil’s particle accelerator, and genetic engineering with CRISPR-Cas9, was essential to unravel  CelOCE’s unprecedented mechanism. “This work exemplifies the potential opened up by the integration and synergy between CNPEM’s different scientific competencies”, highlights the institution’s General Director.

Read more on CNPEM website

How farming practices can help mitigate climate change

How farming practices can help mitigate climate change

With carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere increasing in recent decades, there is a growing urgency to find strategies for capturing and holding carbon.

Researchers from Kansas State University (K-State) are exploring how different farming practices can affect the amount of carbon that gets stored in soil. Using the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan (USask) and the Advanced Light Source in Berkeley, California, they analyzed soil from a cornfield in Kansas that had been farmed with no tilling for the past 22 years. During that time, the farm used a variety of different soil nitrogen management practices, including no fertilizer, chemical fertilizer, and manure/compost fertilizer.

“We were trying to understand what the mechanisms are behind increasing soil carbon storage using certain management practices,” says Dr. Ganga Hettiarachchi, professor of soil and environmental chemistry at Kansas State University. “We were looking at not just soil carbon, but other soil minerals that are going to help store carbon.”

As has been shown in other studies, the K-state researchers found that the soil enhanced (treated) with manure or compost fertilizer stores more carbon than soil that received either chemical fertilizer or no fertilizer. More exciting though, says Hettiarachchi, the ultrabright synchrotron light enabled them to see how the carbon gets stored: they found that it was preserved in pores and some carbon had attached itself to minerals in the soil.

Read more on CLS website

Turning mine waste into healthy soil

Turning mine waste into healthy soil

Tailings, the waste left after extracting precious and critical minerals, often contain harmful chemicals and heavy metals that can pollute soil, water, and even crops. There are over 1800 tailings storage facilities around the world, and in 2019, a tailings dam in Brazil collapsed; close to 300 people drowned in the waste, which also polluted local land and waterways.

Now a team led by researchers at the University of Queensland has developed an innovative method to turn harmful tailings into healthy soil. The scientists used the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan to determine the underlying mechanism of their process.

Longbin Huang, a professor with the University of Queensland, said it’s costly and environmentally risky to store tailings over the long term and that other processes for remediating mine waste are slow and extremely expensive. “We have basically taken engineering solutions into the context of natural soil formation from rocks, because tailings have some useful minerals common to natural rocks.” Their solution, he said, could save billions of dollars around the world and carry a host of environmental benefits.

“Tailings have no biologically friendly properties for growing plants. Roots and water cannot penetrate them, and soluble salts and metals in tailings can kill plants and soil microbes,” said Huang. “If you wait for nature to slowly weather the tailings and turn them into soil, it could take a couple thousand years.”

Huang and colleagues found a way to accelerate natural soil formation processes to convert tailings into healthy soil. They recently published their findings in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

“We can convert these colossal volumes of biologically hostile tailings into growth media similar to natural soil by developing soil structure that will enable biological activity of microbes and plants, basically establishing a natural ecosystem,” he explained.

The process involves encouraging specific microbes to grow in tailings that have been amended with plant mulch from agricultural waste and urban green waste. These microbes “eat” the organics and minerals in tailings, transforming them into functional aggregates (or soil crumbs), the building blocks of healthy soil.  

Read more on CLS website