Synthetic Biology System Pulls More C02 from Air Than Plants

World’s first CO2-fixing cycle in a test tube
A team of researchers led by Tobias J. Erb at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology made the world’s first synthetic biological system that fixes CO2 more efficiently than plants. Plants have been using the enzyme rubisco to turn carbon dioxide into useful carbon compounds for millions of years, but it is slow and “fixes oxygen” instead of CO2 about 20% of the time (according to Chemical and Engineering News). The article from Sarah Everts is summarized below.
The steps used to make a synthetic biology system that fixes CO2 more efficiently than plants:
The next step would be to create this system in a living organism, not a desktop test-tube. This is very challenging. The energy-efficient CO2-fixing pathway is a “breakthrough for synthetic biology, and it extends the capabilities for recapturing atmospheric CO2 for use as a carbon feedstock,” say Fuyu Gong and Yin Li at the Chinese Academy of Sciences on the new study (Science 2016, DOI: 10.1126/science.aal1559). Thank you to original source Sarah Everts (Chemical and Engineering News).
– Keri Kukral @kerikukral
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