In Kenya, the ease of transferring money via mobile phone has increased incomes in rural areas, enabled small businesses to thrive and reshaped the country’s economy.
Thanks to this mobile money revolution, a taxi driver working in Nairobi can give a local merchant $50 in wages and the cell phone number of his wife in the family’s home village. The wife gets a text message, then goes to a rural merchant who either immediately gives her $48, or distributes some portion of the wages and keeps the rest for her in savings.(more…)
New Technique Identifies Populations Within a Microbial Community Responsible for Biomass Deconstruction
One of the keys to commercialization of advanced biofuels is the development of cost-competitive ways to extract fermentable sugars from lignocellulosic biomass. The use of enzymes from thermophiles – microbes that thrive at extremely high temperatures and alkaline conditions – holds promise for achieving this. Finding the most effective of these microbial enzymes, however, has been a challenge. That challenge has now been met by a collaboration led by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI).
Working with a compost-derived consortium of thermophillic bacterium adapted to grow on switchgrass, a leading potential fuel crop, and using a combination of metagenomic and metaproteomic technologies, the collaboration has identified individual microbial species whose enzymes were the most active in deconstructing the switchgrass biomass. Major institutes in addition to JBEI participating in this collaboration included DOE’s Joint Genome Institute (JGI), and EMSL, the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a national scientific user facility at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). (more…)
