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| By Photo by Eric Erbe, digital colorization by Christopher Pooley, both of USDA, ARS, EMU. - This image was released by the Agricultural Research Service, the research agency of the United States Department of Agriculture, with the ID K11077-1 (next)., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=958857 |
Dr. Thomas Brutnell, a plant geneticist and molecular biologist, engineers photosynthesis in plants and advises private and public organizations regarding plant genetics. Aside from his professional projects, Thomas Brutnell has written and contributed to a number of papers, including “Climate-smart crops with enhanced photosynthesis.”
Escherichia coli or E. coli, has been a workhorse for biology and genetics for decades. In a recent paper published in Cell (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2019.11.009), Gleizer and colleagues conducted an elegant engineering feat by endowing E. coli with the capacity to fix CO2, a major greenhouse gas, into simple sugars. By rewiring central metabolism of the bacterium to use CO2 as a carbon source and formate as a reductant , the authors then tapped evolution to drive the synthetic biology. After 200 days of directed evolution, the group was able to generate a bacterium capable of fixing CO2 via the Calvin cycle.
As climate change is perhaps our greatest social, economic and scientific challenge for the foreseeable future, this study paves the way for a promising line of research with global implications. As the authors suggest, this work could provide a framework for enhancing the production of bioproducts produced using electrochemically generated formate from CO2 and thus could result in net negative carbon emissions. This work also opens up the possibility to enhance Rubisco kinetics for bacterial and plant systems.
Escherichia coli or E. coli, has been a workhorse for biology and genetics for decades. In a recent paper published in Cell (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2019.11.009), Gleizer and colleagues conducted an elegant engineering feat by endowing E. coli with the capacity to fix CO2, a major greenhouse gas, into simple sugars. By rewiring central metabolism of the bacterium to use CO2 as a carbon source and formate as a reductant , the authors then tapped evolution to drive the synthetic biology. After 200 days of directed evolution, the group was able to generate a bacterium capable of fixing CO2 via the Calvin cycle.
As climate change is perhaps our greatest social, economic and scientific challenge for the foreseeable future, this study paves the way for a promising line of research with global implications. As the authors suggest, this work could provide a framework for enhancing the production of bioproducts produced using electrochemically generated formate from CO2 and thus could result in net negative carbon emissions. This work also opens up the possibility to enhance Rubisco kinetics for bacterial and plant systems.
