Green Tomorrow

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The lowly, ubiquitous E. coli, long given a bad rap for its association with food poisoning (see: spinach) despite its more common beneficial roles in the human stomach, could yet gain a broader measure of respectability if Thomas Wood’s research pans out. Wood, a professor of chemical engineering at Texas A&M, successfully tweaked a strain of E. coli to get it to produce 140 times more hydrogen than it does naturally.

He and his colleagues selectively removed 6 genes from t…