Grow your own

BURIED in the news a few weeks ago was an announcement by a small Californian firm called Amyris. It was, perhaps, a parable for the future of biotechnology. Amyris is famous in the world of tropical medicine for applying the latest biotechnological tools to the manufacture of artemisinin, an antimalarial drug that is normally extracted from a Chinese vine. The vines cannot produce enough of the stuff, though, so Amyris's researchers have taken a few genes here and there, tweaked them and stitched them together into a biochemical pathway enabling bacteria to make a chemical precursor that can easily be converted into the drug.

But that is not what the announcement was about. Instead, it was that Amyris was going into partnership with Crystalsev, a Brazilian firm, to make car fuel out of cane sugar. Not ethanol (though Brazil already has a thriving market for ethanol-powered cars), but a hydrocarbon that has the characteristics of diesel fuel. Technically, it is not ordinary diesel, either: in chemist-speak, it is an isoprenoid rather than a mixture of alkanes and aromatics. But the driver will not notice the difference.