Small Sources of Sweetness

摘要

The sucrose sourced from sugarcane to sweeten our tea and cake-and more recently, to foster ethanol as a transportation fuel-is the same molecule produced by many microorganisms that potentially face fewer cultivation constraints. The trouble is that the microbes don't release their sugar easily. Ducat ef at. noted that heterotro phic and autotrophic bacteria induce oppositely directed transmembrane proton gradients, and as such, a gradient-dependent native transporter that pulls sucrose into the former might expel it from the latter.