What do termites and cars have in common? They could both run on wood … sort of. To make ethanol, sugar has to go through a fermentation process. To get that sugar, plant cells need to be broken down; a great place to find lots of plant cells is in wood. This is where the termites come in.

Mike Scharf of Purdue University has dissected the guts of termites to find what gives them the power to digest wood, breaking it down into sugars they can utilize. Turns out that the actual innards of a termite itself produce some valuable enzymes, but so do symbionts — beneficial organisms — which live inside the termite. Combined together, these enzymes are the key to breaking through the tough cell wall of plants and making some sugar.

Scharf says that these symbionts have been overlooked, and scientists have previously thought the termite only needed them for digestion; but now he knows they may hold the key to easily producing biofuels. Scharf’s laboratory made synthetic versions of the enzymes by injecting them into a caterpillar and having it produce copious amounts of them; the tests showed that “the host termite enzymes are very effective at releasing sugar from biomass.”

The cell wall, found only in plants, has until now been a barrier when it came to easily retrieving the sugar from plant cells. With these termite enzymes, and the enzymes of the symbionts all working synergistically, Scharf hopes to perfect a formula to squeeze much more sugars from biomass than we are currently getting. This will help make green cars more viable and fuel production possibly cheaper.

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All images: jon hanson/Flickr via Science Daily