Methanol out of CO2+H2O

[Mega]

Guys,

I was wondering if anyone has ever heard of a metabolic pathway that makes methanol out of just carbon dioxid and water...
Of course, it doesn't have to be direct conversion, but at the end there should be methanol. And just microorganisms should be used.


Regards

[Cathal Garvey]

Directly, no. But under the wrong conditions, yeast will ferment some methanol rather than the usual ethanol.

The traditional way to get methanol is to dry-distill wood. Heat-cracking of wood polymers yields methanol, along with lots of dirty, flammable smoke I imagine. That's where methanol got the common name "wood alcohol".

I would like to suggest some safety reading on methanol first if you're thinking of working with it. I've never used it myself, but I'm told it's a nasty strong solvent, and of course it's infamously toxic. Also, with a lower boiling point than ethanol it's probably more volatile and prone to ignition. Take care!

Mega <masters...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Mega]

Thanks...

I thought about methanol fuel cells driven by bacteria (e.g. for space applications as I imagine that this would have more energy density than batteries)

But as there seems to be no natural pathway, for me it's still to hard to engineer one. It's probably better to hibernate thoughts on this until I routienly do transformations ;)

[Matthew Conway]

Academic research on reverse microbial fuel cells focuses on production of higher alcohols, i.e. isobutanol, which has similar energy density to gasoline.  http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6076/1596.full.pdf 

So you were thinking along the right lines, but cells can actually make higher alchohols, and they have preferable properties, so maybe look into this.