Photosynthesis quite literally changed our world. Plants 'eating' sunlight and 'breathing out' oxygen transformed Earth's entire atmosphere into the one we now breathe, and fuel our ecosystems with energy.
Now researchers have caught a cunning species of bacteria with stolen photosynthesizing technology. And their molecular, light-eating device is unlike any we've ever seen.The architecture of the complex is very elegant. A real masterpiece of nature," says Michal Koblizek from the Czech Academy of Sciences' Institute of Microbiology. "It has not only good structural stability, but also great light harvesting efficiency."
While we know of plenty of photosynthetic bacteria already, what's happening inside Gobi desert dwelling Gemmatimonas phototrophica is unique.
Sometime during the bacterium's history, it stole a whole suite of photosynthesis-related genes from a more ancient proteobacterium – a completely different phylum of bacteria.
Bacteria are known for breaking down lactose to make yogurt and sugar to make beer. Now researchers led by Northwestern University and LanzaTech have harnessed bacteria to break down waste carbon dioxide (CO2) to make valuable industrial chemicals.
In a new pilot study, the researchers selected, engineered, and optimized a bacteria strain and then successfully demonstrated its ability to convert CO2 into acetone and isopropanol (IPA).
Not only does this new gas fermentation process remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, but it also avoids using fossil fuels, which are typically needed to generate acetone and IPA. After performing life-cycle analysis, the team found the carbon-negative platform could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 160% as compared to conventional processes, if widely adopted.
The study will be published today (February 21, 2022) in the journal Nature Biotechnology.
These innovations, led by cell-free strategies that guided both strain engineering and optimization of pathway enzymes, accelerated time to production by more than a year,” Jewett said.
The Northwestern and LanzaTech teams believe the developed strains and fermentation process will translate to industrial scale. The approach also could potentially be applied to create streamlined processes for generating other valuable chemicals.
“This discovery is a major step forward in avoiding a climate catastrophe,” said Jennifer Holmgren, LanzaTech CEO. “Today, most of our commodity chemicals are derived exclusively from new fossil resources such as oil, natural gas or coal. Acetone and IPA are two examples with a combined global market of $10 billion. The acetone and IPA pathways developed will accelerate the development of other new products by closing the carbon cycle for their use in multiple industries.”
Reference: “Carbon-negative, scaled-up production of acetone and isopropanol by gas fermentation” 21 February 2022, Nature Biotechnology.
Jewett is a member of the Chemistry of Life Processes Institute, Simpson Querrey Institute for BioNanotechnology and the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University.
The study, “Carbon-negative, scaled-up production of acetone and isopropanol by gas fermentation,” was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Bioenergy Technologies Office (award numbers DE-EE0007566 and CRADA/NFE-16-06364), DOE Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research Division, Genomic Science Program (award numbers DE-SC0018249 and FWP ERKP903), the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Program. The outer rings snatch at sunlight, with the extra ring adding 800 and 816 nm absorption bands to the 868 nm absorption of the inner ring. They then funnel their captured photons down toward the reaction center where the chromophores, like the green chlorophyll.
You must be logged in to post a comment.