For the production of ethanol in Gram-positive bacteria to become a viable alternative for the production of fuels, it will be necessary to find a PDC that can be expressed at high enough levels to rapidly channel pyruvate to acetaldehyde. Until now, there has not been a PDC that has been expressed well in a recombinant Gram-positive bacterium (Gold et al., 1992, 1996; Barbosa et al., 1994; Nichols et al., 2003).