CESBIC--Critical Enzymes for Sustainable Biofuels from Cellulose

糖可以发酵成乙醇，然后再蒸馏成足够好的乙醇用作燃料。这是生物乙醇。生物乙醇是一种“可持续燃料”，这意味着它的生产和使用对环境的影响要比石油或天然气小得多。它可以为满足我们未来的能源需求做出重大贡献。那么为什么我们不更多地使用生物乙醇呢？答案首先在于制作它所需要的糖。为了可持续，糖主要需要来自植物。然而，植物只产生相对少量的糖。植物的大部分能量都集中在一种叫做纤维素的物质中（本质上是赋予植物结构的物质），虽然它是由单个糖单位组成的，但不能有效地分解成单个糖单位，因此不能发酵。这意味着植物的绝大部分在生产生物乙醇时是无用的。因此，人们一直在全球范围内寻找一种既有效又简单的将纤维素转化为糖的方法。这样的解决方案现在看来是唾手可得的。事实证明，真菌一直在进行这种化学反应，通过分泌酶来攻击它们正在降解的纤维素植物材料。最近，这些酶被分离出来并进行了研究。它们的结构和生化功能都是前所未有的。很明显，我们需要更详细地研究这些酶，以充分利用它们。这个项目的目标就是要做到这一点，不仅要研究酶本身，还要研究如何将这些酶直接用于工业生产生物乙醇。该项目汇集了来自英国、丹麦和法国的一些主要研究人员。我们将采取所谓的“基因组学到催化剂”的方法，基因组学可以让我们了解用于降解纤维素的所有真菌酶，而“催化剂”部分则是将这些知识发展为工业催化剂。

Sugar can be fermented to ethanol which can then be distilled to give ethanol good enough to be used as a fuel. This is bioethanol. Bioethanol is a 'sustainable fuel' meaning that its production and use has a significantly lower impact on the environment than oil or gas. It can make a major contribution to meeting our future energy demands. Why then don't we make more use of bioethanol? The answer lies in the sugar that is needed to make it in the first place. To be sustainable the sugars need to come primarily from plants. However, plants only produce relatively small amounts of sugar. Most of a plant's energy is tied up in a material called cellulose (essentially the material that gives a plant its structure), which-whilst it is made up of individual sugar units-cannot be efficiently broken down into its individual sugar units and therefore cannot be fermented. This means that the vast majority of a plant is useless in producing bioethanol.Therefore, there has been a global search for a means of converting cellulose to sugar which is both efficient and simple. Such a solution now appears to be within our grasp. It turns out that fungi do this chemistry all of the time, by secreting enzymes which attack the cellulosic plant material they are degrading. Very recently these enzymes were isolated and studied. They were shown to be unprecedented in terms of their structure and biochemical function. It is clear that we need to study these enzymes in much more detail to make the best use of them.This project aims to do exactly that, not only by studying the enzymes themselves, but also seeing how these can be then used directly in industry to make bioethanol. The project brings together some of the leading investigators from the UK, Denmark and France. We will take what is called a 'genomics to catalyst' approach, where the genomics allows to understand the full range of fungal enzymes that are used to degrade cellulose, and the 'catalyst' part is developing this knowledge to working industrial catalysts.