Question: AS the gribbles eat wood and you would like to utilise this for fuel, would many trees be cut down jsut to fuel human vehicles and deforestation be much worse in the future?

William Eborall answered on 20 Jun 2011:

Hi tpeng.

What we’re hoping to do is learn how gribble is able to eat wood.

Wood is made of something called lignocellulose, and this is the same stuff that things like leaves, grass and stems are made out of.

If we can work out how gribble can eat (digest) lignocellulose then hopefully we could use this to digest waste material like wheat straw (what’s left after you take the wheat seeds from a wheat plant to make flour). This would be done in a factory not using any gribble at all, just the knowledge we got from studying them. It would also only be done with waste material or wood that had been grown specifically to make fuel out of. This would mean there was no deforestation associated with making bio-fuel.

I hope that helps, feel free to ask more questions.