Is there nothing the might yeast can't do?

Researchers at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), led by Dr. Jay Keasling at UC Berkeley, have engineered the common industrial yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae with an n-butanol biosynthetic pathway, resulting in a ten-fold improvement in n-butanol production from one of the strains to 2.5 mg/L. An open access paper on their work was published online 3 December in the journal Microbial Cell Factories.

Butanol has a number of advantages over ethanol for use as a biofuel—it is more hydrophobic; has a higher energy density; can be transported through existing pipeline infrastructure; and can be mixed with gasoline at any ratio.

Green Car Congress: JBEI Researchers Engineer Yeast to Produce n-Butanol: "JBEI Researchers Engineer Yeast to Produce n-Butanol"