{"id":39498,"date":"2016-12-14T07:32:57","date_gmt":"2016-12-14T06:32:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/?p=39498"},"modified":"2021-09-09T21:39:29","modified_gmt":"2021-09-09T19:39:29","slug":"synbio-reinvents-photosynthesis-with-artificial-co2-fixing-pathway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/synbio-reinvents-photosynthesis-with-artificial-co2-fixing-pathway\/","title":{"rendered":"SynBio reinvents Photosynthesis with artificial CO2<\/sub>-fixing Pathway"},"content":{"rendered":"

Removing CO2 from the atmosphere could help with climate change, and there\u2019s now a new biological method in the making to achieve this. Researchers have developed a new turbo-charged version of a metabolic pathway for fixing CO2, which is 20% more efficient than in plants.<\/p>\n

As described in an article just published in Science<\/a>, a German research team has shown the feasibility of fixing CO2 via its improved version of the dark cycle of photosynthesis. The pathway, made of 17 enzymes from 9 different organisms, outperforms the natural pathway in plants and could mitigate climate change. The research started out at ETH Zurich, a key institution for emerging Biotechs in the area<\/a>, and now goes on at the Max Planck Institute in Marburg, Germany.<\/p>\n

The new metabolic pathway, CETCH, was designed to give the Calvin cycle, part of the photosynthesis in plants, a run for its money. The team leader of this project, Tobias Erb, had succeeded in isolating a very efficient CO2-fixing enzyme, which is faster and more accurate than the RuBisCo<\/a> enzyme occurring naturally in plants. However, simply replacing the enzyme in the original Calvin cycle did not work, as the enzymes were not compatible. Consequently, there was a need to build an artificial pathway.<\/p>\n

Figure 1: The CETCH metabolic pathway.<\/p>\n

From large databases of known enzymes, researchers picked a few dozen candidates which could perform the required tasks. Then they spent two years combining enzymes in the laboratory to test their efficiency as a system. The 17 enzymes that made the final cut include 3 designer enzymes, which are one of the key challenges of synthetic biology<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The main goal of this work is to create, down the line, an efficient way to convert CO2 into useful chemical compounds. Using CO2 as feedstock is a popular idea, with other projects like EnobraQ, but this is is the first time a synthetic CO2-fixing cycle is developed.<\/p>\n

While the pathway has still only been tested in vitro, it could be transferred to bacteria or algae to produce a wide range of products, as in biorefineries. A major selling point for using CO2 as a raw material is the reduction of the environmental impact, potentially even helping to remove the excess of this greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. In this interview<\/a> about his work, Erb is careful with the impact of this designer pathway and the need to consider the emission reduction. Nevertheless, a CO2-based biotechnology can definitely be an important part of a greener future.<\/p>\n

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