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Last week the startup Qteros, named for the Q Microbe that Dr. Leschine discovered 13 years ago, raised $25 million from a group of venture capital firms active in clean technology research. Leschine and the other founders of Qteros, who have been working for years to fine tune the Q Microbe, say they have vastly improved its ethanol-producing abilities and expect to have a commercial product on the market by 2011. If they succeed, they will have attained one of the holy grails on the path to energy independence: finding a way to produce clean-burning ethanol in a manner that, unlike most of the processes that exist today, would consume minimal fuel and leave a minimal carbon footprint. Cleaner-burning fuel is a story in its own right, but the story of how Qteros got to this point is one of extraordinarily good luck combined with extraordinarily hard work that could lead other entrepreneurs -- especially those focused on life sciences -- to rethink their strategies. At its center is Leschine, a University of Massachusetts, Amherst microbiology professor. She seems more comfortable in the role of unassuming scientist than high-profile startup company founder, but has a keen appreciation for the treasures that stand to be uncovered from the earth, and the hard labor required to find them. "I think there is a lesson here and what it says is that the microbial world holds such diversity that it can solve lots of problems," says Leschine. "For a long time there was a lot of this kind of research going on, but we've gotten away from it." Part of the reason that Leschine, along with research assistant Tom Warnick, were able to discover the Q Microbe in the first place is that they weren't looking for a compound to solve the world's energy problems, but rather just wanted to assess the diversity of microbes capable of breaking down plant material. Although she and colleagues had collected soil samples from as far away as Brazil, it was soil gathered from around the Quabbin Reservoir near her offices in western Massachusetts that yielded the microbe with the unusual ethanol producing qualities. "That was one of the amazing things," she says. "We had been looking at soil samples from all around the world." But single-cell microbes in a pile of dirt are hard to read and it was not until 1997, two years after its discovery, that Leschine's team realized that this particular microbe was unusual enough to warrant further study. As part of their work, they'd been exhaustively examining the properties of a whole host of microbes and it took a while to see which ones stood out.. Seven more years of research followed before the real lightbulb moment came: While none of the other substances Lechine had been studying could grow on feedstock or produce ethanol, the Q Microbe was found to be able to do both, basically eating plants and spitting out ethanol. "It was counterintuitive," Leschine says. "From what we had learned to that point, it should have been producing something else. That was our Eureka moment." Patent applications quickly followed, along with applications for funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, the founding of a formal company around the Q Microbe, and the sort of even more intensified research that comes with the understanding that there is huge commercial potential. Leschine says today that putting the Q Microbe to use commercially would likely be a pretty simple process, similar to the way another natural substance -- yeast -- is put into large vats to produce beer. Clearly Qteros' story is one that would seem to be impossible to repeat, particularly given the lucky break of finding the Q Microbe in the first place. And luck notwithstanding, many entrepreneurs focused on exits from the very start might be turned off by the years of research required in Leschine's line of work. But at a time when so many researchers are focused on genetically modifying natural substances to create what Qteros co-founder Jef Sharp describes as "frankenbugs," many are overlooking the vast diversity that exists in nature, Leshine says. Although she did not set out to find a natural way to produce ethanol, she was inspired by the abundance of nature. "What led me to do this research in the first place was the understanding that we know less than one tenth of one percent of the microbes that are out there," she says. "It was just a search and there were no guarantees but I was encouraged by how little we knew." -Andrea Orr See Nov. 19 post on Qteros from Tech Confidential
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At a time when scientists and entrepreneurs are performing a lot of hard-core work in the lab, rearranging the molecular structures of naturally-occurring substances in an effort to develop some cleaner ways to generate power, Dr. Susan Leschine (pictured) is focusing her research on a tiny little microbe with astonishing powers to make ethanol, which she happened upon not far from her own back yard.
