Can Termites Save the World?

Nov. 11, 2009— -- For years now Mike Scharf has been diving into the guts of termites, trying to figure out how to reproduce their magic. Termites, as every kid knows, can eat their way through a gnarly piece of wood and destroy a new house while the paint is still drying.

They do that by mysteriously converting plant material into fuel to power their complex lifestyles. And they do it better than almost anything else on the planet, especially the pricy, human-made processing plants that are trying to replicate what comes naturally to bugs like termites.

Scharf, an entomologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, is among many scientists around the world who are trying to make the conversion from plant material to ethanol simpler and less expensive. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, half this country's gasoline could be replaced by ethanol if the production could be made more cost effective.

With present technology, it takes so much energy to convert plant material to ethanol that many scientists wonder if it's worth it. If they were as clever as termites, it would be a piece of cake. And wouldn't termites be a surprising ally? According to Ohio State University, termites cause about $2 billion in damages across this nation every year. It's about time they came to our aid.

So Scharf and his colleagues have spent a lot of time over the past five years picking termites apart to see exactly what's involved in their dietary process. It turns out that it's a lot. And learning about it is a bit challenging.

"First, you have to be really good at pulling out their guts so you can isolate them from the rest of the body," Scharf said in a telephone interview. "Their gut is about the size of half of our eyelash. So you work under a microscope and you get really good with your hands." After that, it's all biochemistry and molecular biology.

The Florida researchers have isolated 6,555 genes involved in the digestive process of more than 2,500 worker termites. So they now know which genes are important in converting wood's cellulose and lignin into sugar, which can then be converted into ethanol. But the termites can't do it alone.