Sue Leschine fuels biomass-to-ethanol advancement

Patience pays off – at least in the case of Sue Leschine and the Q Microbe™.

Leschine is the UMass Amherst microbiologist who, during her 20-plus years of research, discovered the microscopic but mighty organism.

She’s also a founder and chief scientist of Qteros, the Marlborough-based company turning the prospect of biomass-to-biofuel into commercial reality.

Unlike other known microbes, the Q Microbe can produce quantities of ethanol out of the biomass in any type of plant or tree – in one step vs. the usual two steps. Such “cellulosic ethanol” promises to be a sustainable alternative to petroleum with greater reductions in greenhouse gas emissions than the current corn-based ethanol biofuel.

This summer, at the World Congress on Industrial Biotechnology and Bioprocessing in Montreal, Leschine announced that Qteros’s process has achieved unprecedented ethanol outputs of 70 grams per liter (9 percent by volume) in a single-step process on industrial feedstocks such as corn stover. This surpasses the 50-grams-per-liter threshold for commercial viability.

Before jumping into production, however, Qteros plans to improve on its process. The accomplishments to date have been made without genetically engineering the microbe, and so the next steps will include strain improvement. The company expects to open its first pilot plant next year and scale up the following year.

The ultimate goal is to help the federal government meet its mandate for 16 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol per year by 2022 – at a cost comparable to gasoline.

Back in the lab, Leschine is delving deeper into the biology of the Q Microbe in order to understand how to make ethanol faster/better/cheaper.

“We’re finding novel steps in the pathway to ethanol production, which suggest some new biology that had not previously been known,” she says. “Scientists thought they had the physiology and metabolism of the microbe figured out. To find something novel at this point is very exciting.”

Leschine’s love for biology started in her family’s suburban New Jersey vegetable garden. “I learned to observe nature with my father’s encouragement and to ask questions about the natural world. I think that’s the first step to becoming a scientist,” she says.

Planning to become a social worker, Leschine took sciences courses on the side at the University of Pittsburgh. After a semester of microbiology, she was switching majors.

Graduating with her doctorate in microbiology and biophysics, Leschine came to the University of Massachusetts Amherst for her post-doc training because she had “fallen in love” with microbes and wanted to know more about their roles in the environment.

“I was very interested that something as tiny as a microbe could tackle trees, which are so difficult to break down,” Leschine says. “Trees’ main component is cellulose, so I became interested in understanding how microbes decompose cellulose.”

Over a 20-year period as full-time researcher/faculty at UMass, Leschine isolated and characterized the bacteria that break down plant material in order to understand the depths of their diversity.

“In the back of my mind, there was always this idea that plant material – biomass – is an abundant potential resource and that we could use these microbes to convert biomass into useful products,” she says.

Ethanol is a typical microbe byproduct, but, for nearly all of the microbes Leschine was studying from around the world, ethanol production was minimal. Except for this one microbe that came from soil collected near the Quabbin Reservoir. Although the findings turned up while experimenting for other reasons, the potential was all too clear.
“The Q microbe wasn’t restricted to one or two of the very complex components that make up plants, but could break down all of them and its main product was ethanol,” Leschine says.

What’s more, the more cellulose the microbe was fed, the more ethanol it produced, unlike other self-limiting microbes. “That was a key discover,” Leschine says, “that this was a microbe that had potential for commercialization in a process to convert biomass into ethanol.”

To Leschine’s mind, the microbe opened up the possibility for an efficient alternative to oil and its carbon dioxide output while using the more than one billion tons of plant waste the Dept. of Energy estimates are available each year.

Sugarcane waste, wood waste, corn husks and stalks, even native grasses and plants grown specifically for ethanol production – the Q Microbe loves them all. “With the Q Microbe process, we can look at waste streams as feedstock,” Leschine says.

In order to realize the potential benefits of the technology, Leschine began looking for a company interested in commercializing it. After a year, with no bites, she realized the only way to get her microbe process out of the lab and into the market was to start a company.

“I’m a scientist. I don’t know the first thing about business,” she says. “At that time, I encountered five very talented and seasoned entrepreneurs who had formed a new venture to identify green technologies that they could bring to market. It was perfect.”

The company started as SunEthanol in 2006, but the name was later changed to Qteros. At first, Leschine was involved in hiring and training the right scientists.

As the company has grown – there are 40 on board, with a chief technology officer recently hired – Leschine’s role has shifted more to scientific consultant.

Still, she finds balancing her teaching, research and other university responsibilities along with her work for Qteros to be a challenge.

“The research on the Q Microbe is exploding,” Leschine says. “We now have the complete genome sequence, which is a wealth of information that is opening all sorts of new research opportunities and collaborations.

“We’re looking at the Q Microbe at a very detailed level,” she continues, “and we also plan to go back to nature to understand and tap the natural diversity of the microbial world, using the Q Microbe as our model.”

With so much potential for finding microbial solutions for world problems, is she ever overwhelmed?

“We do have a lot to do. There’s enough for an army of researchers,” Leschine says. “This is why I am grateful to work with such talented colleagues, experts from a broad range of disciplines – plant and microbial biologists, experts in molecular biology, genomics science and engineering. Collaboratively, we design and coordinate our studies so that we’ll actually be able to come up with answers to our questions.”


Source:bostonherald