Engineered bacteria can help us turn greenhouse gases into useful chemicals

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Gases emitted in industrial pollution — including the greenhouse gas CO2 — can be converted into two useful chemicals (acetone and isopropanol) using engineered bacteria, according to international researchers. This process is already used in the food industry to make yoghurt and beer, but researchers have now shown that the bacterium Clostridium autoethanogenum can be genetically engineered to create chemicals it does not normally produce such as acetone and isopropanol. The process that manufactures these chemicals usually emits greenhouse gases, but this new process fixes more carbon than it emits, so the team says this is a carbon-negative alternative to current processes.

Journal/conference: Nature Biotechnology

Research: Paper

Organisation/s: LanzaTech Inc., USA

Funder: Cell-free prototyping work was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research Division, Genomic Science Program, under contract nos. DE-SC0018249 and FWP ERKP903 (F.L., B.J.R., R.O.J., N.L.E., T.J.T., R.J.G., R.L.H., A.S.K., S.D.S., S.D.B., M.C.J. and M.K.). This manuscript was co-authored by UT-Battelle under contract no. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy (T.J.T., N.L.E., R.J.G. and R.L.H.). DNA synthesis for the gene libraries was supported by the Joint Genome Institute Community Science Program under award no. CSP-503280; https://doi.org/10.46936/10.25585/60001121 (M.C.J. and M.K.). The work conducted by the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (https://ror.org/04xm1d337), a DOE Office of Science User Facility, is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy operated under contract no. DE-AC02-05CH11231. B.J.R. is supported by a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship (award ND-CEN-017-095). We also thank the following investors in LanzaTech’s technology: BASF, CICC Growth Capital Fund I, CITIC Capital, Indian Oil Company, K1W1, Khosla Ventures, the Malaysian Life Sciences Capital Fund, L. P., Mitsui, the New Zealand Superannuation Fund, Novo Holdings A/S, Petronas Technology Ventures, Primetals, Qiming Venture Partners, Softbank China and Suncor.

Media release

From: Springer Nature

1.  Biotechnology: Engineered bacteria produce industrial chemicals from waste gases (N&V)

Gases emitted in industrial pollution — including the greenhouse gas CO2 — can be converted into two useful chemicals (acetone and isopropanol) using engineered bacteria, according to a study published in Nature Biotechnology. This method provides a carbon-negative alternative to current processes for manufacturing these chemicals from petroleum or natural gas.

Microbial fermentation — used in the food industry to make yogurt, beer and other products — is a promising approach for manufacturing a wide variety of chemicals from non-fossil fuel sources. Most work in this field has relied on microbes that ferment sugars; however, the use of sugars as a raw material is costly and raises the total greenhouse gas emissions of the production process. Certain bacteria, however, are capable of gas fermentation — converting gases such as CO2 into more complex molecules. This has opened up the opportunity for gases found in industrial emissions or generated from biomass and municipal waste to be turned into useful products.

Michael Köpke, Michael Jewett and colleagues show how the bacterium Clostridium autoethanogenum can be genetically engineered to synthesize chemicals it does not normally produce. The authors demonstrate the production of acetone and isopropanol — two chemicals with a combined global market of over US$10 billion — with high efficiency and selectivity in a pilot experiment at the industrial scale. Whereas existing processes for manufacturing these chemicals from petroleum or natural gas contribute to climate change, the system described by Köpke and colleagues fixes more carbon than it emits and therefore has a negative carbon footprint.

The authors suggest that their sustainable alternative for acetone and isopropanol manufacture can be adapted to produce a diverse array of other useful chemicals.

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