Leafcutter ants have the ability to produce fungi and bacteria with the plant material they cut.
The fungi and bacteria communities provide the ants with food and shelter, but researchers believe the finding could help aid in biofuel production, according to the University of Wisconsin.
"We are interested in the whole fungus garden community, because a lot of plant biomass goes in and is converted to energy for the ants," said Frank Aylward, a bacteriology graduate student and researcher with the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center who participated in the study.
Aylward believes a new-found fungal enzyme could help to break down non-food biomass, which could be processed into fuel.
"All the enzymes that we found are similar to known enzymes, but they are completely new; no one had identified or characterized them until now, " he said.
Researchers looked at genome sequencing to understand the way the fungi and bacteria worked.
"We really tried as thoroughly as possible to characterize the biomass degrading enzymes produced," Aylward said. "Identifying all these new enzymes really opens the door to technological applications, because we could potentially mix and match them with others that we already know about to achieve even better biomass degradation."
The fungi needs sugar to thrive, which comes from the long cellulose molecules found in the leaf clippings the ants leave behind. The fungus produces enzymes that break down the materials to get to those sugars. Both the fungus and bacteria use enzymes to break down the cellulose.
"We think there could potentially be a division of labor between the fungus and bacteria," said Garret Suen, co-author of the study and a UW-Madison assistant professor of bacteriology and Wisconsin Energy Institute researcher.
The bacteria helps the fungi by helping them to access the cellulose, breaking apart plant polymers that encase the substance. Researchers hope to use similar methods in order to create biofuel from substances such as grass and corn stalks.
"It's difficult to think that we can actually find a process that improves on nature," Aylward said, "So it probably makes sense to learn from it."
