Biofuels are fuel that come from biological origin like plants,animals or bacteria. The advane of biotechnology methods, the rising in oil priceand the demand to cleaner energy source, is leading to a vast research on the field of using our knowledge of biotechnology to increase the efficiency of biofuels production.

This hub will demonstrate some approaches to use biological engineering to produce more biofuels.

The main problem with bio-fuels today is the source of the bio-products. The two main bio-fuels in use, biodiesel and ethanol are produced from plant oils and from edible crops. If we will replace all the petroleum based fuels with biofuels, we will soon won't have anything to eat. The crops we grow currently are enough for nutrition but cannot produce the amount of bio-materials needed for producing enough fuels.

In order to secure a good resource of energy in the future, we must dramatically increase the amount of biomass in produced by agriculture. There are two principles in doing so:

1. Improving production - increasing the production rate of current agricultural crops, so more plants can be grown in the same time.

2. Improving crops -instead of increasing the amount of crops, we might be able to increase the amount of oils or sugar in any one plants, so the biomass will be larger per each plant.

With biotechnology methods, scientists try constantly to genetic-engineer plants, so they will be enhanced in both directions mentioned above. The methods to do so today are straight forward and we can easly get the genetic code of each gene in any plants (some plants have been sequenced completely). Scientists can also manipulate the expression of each gene, and by doing so to influence the certain quality they are interested in.

By genetically manipulating plants, biologists try to improve several crucial properties of crops that will help to increase their production. The main qualities are: improving water efficiency, flowering time, growth control and time, salinity sensitivity and more.

They also try to change the amount of sugars and oil the plants grow by changing the control systems of plants metabolism. All of these methods together are leading to major shift in agriculture, and we are going to see the frurits of these efforts very soon.

A different approach to biomaterial production for biofuels is to use unicellular organisms, like bacteria and algae to produce the carbon molecules that are used in biofuels production.

Bacteria are much easy to grow, and can produce a huge amount of biochemical in a very short time. Bacteria are also much easier to genetically manipulate, and engineering of bacteria is done regularly almost in any biology lab in the world.

Soon we will be able to use bacteria that grow on agricultural waste, to produce large amount of biofuels.

The only problem with this approach is the need to reinvent the methods of growth, and we cannot relay on well developed agricultural methods that are used everywhere. It is also not known yet what will be the price of these methods.

A different approach to increasing biomass production is to look for new candidate plants that can naturally produce much more biomass than the known crops. The currently used crops are great as nutritional source but not always suite to biodiesel or ethanol production. A good candidate for biodiesel production is Jatropha - a fruit that can produce tremendous amount of oil.

Other candidate are also considered, and the future is probably holding a new reality of agricultural plants.

Biological methods can also be used to accelerate and optimize the production of biofuels.

Examples for that is developing bacteria that can process oils, or increase fermentation for ethanol production. biological enzymes are the most efficient catalysts we know, and might change the way biofuels are produces in a very fundamental way, to make it cheaper and more reliable.