In today�s world, petroleum-based products dominate the market place from gasoline to heating oil for homes and businesses to plastics. What if a process could be created to displace petroleum-based products, a process more environmentally friendly in which carcinogens are neither part of the process or final product?

Eric Singsaas at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point (UWSP) is working on just such a process. As an associate professor of biology and forestry at UWSP, Singsaas is researching a method to "create a bio-chemical pathway where terpenoids (ex. isoprene) could be used in the manufacture of noncarcinogenic products ranging from fuel for your automobile to rubber for your sneakers. To assist his research he has secured $25,139 from American Science and Technology of Wausau, a research and development firm based in Chicago.

"The ethanol process is as old as the fermentation of grains into alcohol," said Singsaas. "While many are viewing ethanol as the path to replace petroleum-based fuels, there is a better, more efficient and environmental way to create noncarcinogenic, nonpetroleum-based fuels and products. In a word�bacteria."

According to Singsaas, he has created in a UWSP laboratory a bacterium that makes isoprene. Isoprene, unlike petroleum, has no carcinogenic agents and is a colorless, volatile liquid often used to make synthetic rubber. The process was first discovered in the mid-1990s by German scientists.

"We�ve got strains of these bacteria here at UWSP and these someday could be the basis of a bio-refining platform toward fuel production, rubber products, almost any product that had been petroleum-based," said Singsaas. "We�ve demonstrated that bacteria can make isoprene." In the future, Singsaas expects that bio-molecules produced from bacteria will be able to replace many products that are now made from petroleum.