Clostridium acetobutylicum,
ATCC 824, is a commercially valuable
bacterium sometimes called the "Weizmann Organism", after Jewish Russian-born biochemist
Chaim Weizmann. A senior lecturer at the
University of Manchester,
England, he used them in 1916 as a bio-chemical tool to produce at the same time, jointly,
acetone,
ethanol, and
n-butanol from
starch. The method has been described since as the
ABE process, (Acetone Butanol Ethanol fermentation process), yielding 3 parts of
acetone, 6 of n-butanol, and 1 of
ethanol. Acetone was used in the important wartime task of casting
cordite. The alcohols were used to produce vehicle fuels and
synthetic rubber.
In 2008, a strain of Escherichia coli was genetically engineered to synthesize butanol; the genes were derived from Clostridium acetobutylicum.[1][2] In 2013, the first microbial production of short-chain
alkanes was reported[3] - which is a considerable step toward the production of gasoline. One of the crucial
enzymes - a
fattyacyl-CoAreductase - came from Clostridium acetobutylicum.