American energy company, Mascoma Corporation, recently announced that it had made major research advances in "Consolidated Bioprocessing (CBP)", a "low cost processing strategy" for production of biofuel ("cellulosic") ethanol from ligno-cellulosic biomass. The concept behind CBP is the integration of saccharification and ethanol fermentation into a single biological processing step. The production of cellulose ethanol is usually accomplished by subjecting the lignocellulosic biomass to three major sequential steps: (1) pretreatment, to remove tough lignin from the plant biomass and to prepare the cellulose fibers for the next degradation step, (2) saccharification, where the cellulose molecules are broken down into simple sugars by the action of "cellulase enzymes", and (3) fermentation of the sugars to ethanol. According to the Mascoma press release, "CBP avoids the need for the costly production of cellulase enzymes by using engineered microorganisms that produce cellulases and ethanol at high yield in a single step". The company was also the first to report the "targeted metabolic engineering of a cellulose-fermenting thermophile, Clostridium thermocellum"..