Jay Keasling, JBEI Chief Executive Officer and Director of New Pathway Development
Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley have engineered bacteria that can use hydrogen gas for energy – freeing up valuable sugar feedstocks to produce renewable fuels and chemicals more efficiently.
Traditionally, microbes that are used to make biofuels consume large amounts of sugar both as a raw material and as an energy source, limiting efficiency and driving up costs. The new approach allows bacteria to "eat" hydrogen gas instead, powering their metabolism without wasting sugar.
Because hydrogen gas provides roughly three times more cellular energy per dollar than sugar, this strategy could dramatically lower production costs for biofuels, bioplastics, and other biomanufactured products – helping them compete with petroleum-derived alternatives.
Graphic: Bacteria use sugar to make biofuels. Bacteria can use hydrogen gas for cellular energy instead of sugars. Biofuels can now be produced with greater efficiency! Artwork by Robert Bertrand, Joint BioEnergy Institute.
"For decades, we've made biofuels the way a car factory would if it burned half its car parts just to power the assembly line." said Bertrand, a post-doctoral fellow at the Joint BioEnergy Institute. "By instead teaching bacteria to use hydrogen gas for energy, we can stop that waste and make renewable production far more efficient".
This study, published in the January 2026 issue of Metabolic Engineering, is titled "Feedstock-efficient conversion through hydrogen and formate-driven metabolism in Escherichia coli". The work was conducted at the Joint BioEnergy Institute, a consortium of UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.