Purple Slime and the Fuelabolic pathway

The bottom line

Long way to go on this one. Will tunicates drive fuels and feeds — hard to say. Maybe not. But certainly it’s food for thought on the structure of organic approaches to making fuels and feed — the construction of synthetic chains.

In the future, we might well expect to see multi-step chains emerge for fuel production — where multiple steps of specialists ingest the excretion of the one to produce an input for another. Nature likes those kinds of systems — we see it in the food chain, and in the metabolic pathway.

No person has anywhere near the diet to directly produce all the nutrients and compounds we need to run the body and feed the monstrous energy appetite of the brain — but cooperative chains have emerged, involving a symbiosis of organic chemistry, a soup of amino acids, and helpful cameos from a host of microbes that outnumber our human cells ten to one.

One day, we will produce most, or all, of our fuels, feed, and chemicals in similar manner. And if we do, and when we do — you may find a jellylike tunicate right at the heart of the system.

More on the story of tunicates in Norway is here.