Scientists at Imperial College London (Imperial) have created a new technique that can produce chemicals using microorganisms such as E. coli and cyanobacteria, which have been engineered to produce these chemicals using atmospheric carbon dioxide.
The researchers have mimicked natural processes within the organisms to find a technique that works.
The university explained that many of the chemicals that can be produced in this way are toxic to the microorganisms themselves, which means it’s not scalable to a level where it would be efficient. However, the researchers think that they have solved this problem by looking at how these organisms deal with the toxic chemicals they produce naturally.
In copying that process, the team believe these microorganisms can now be “programmed” to produce chemicals without harming growth.
This means that all manner of chemicals that are typically produced using fossil fuels could be made using these microorganisms, removing the need for mining and other activities associated with the extraction of the fuels needed to make various chemicals, plastics and fuels.
Dr Patrick Jones, lead researcher on the project from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial, explained how the team approached the problem. “We looked at what nature does already, for its own benefit, and applied the idea to biotechnology, for our benefit,” he stated.
During their research, they used E. coli and cyanobacteria to make 1-octanol, a chemical that’s currently used in perfumes. However, 1-octanol is toxic to the bacteria.
To circumvent this problem, the researchers “added an extra set of instructions to the bacteria so they would produce two different derivatives of 1-octanol that are both less harmful”.
This is essential to effectively scale up the process, as the bacteria would need to produce the non-toxic variety of 1-octanol that could then be chemically transformed back into 1-octanol for use.
Although this is a potentially exciting breakthrough in chemical production, it’s one that’s still in its very early stages. The team at Imperial now want to take this process and set up a complete system, that works from the production of the derivative to the recovery of the desired chemical.
In doing so, they hope to refine the process and identify the most effective way of scaling it up to make it appropriate for industrial use.
There are many breakthroughs happening in the world of sustainable chemistry at the moment, with more and more resources being ploughed into work to identify more environmentally friendly methods of chemical production and chemicals themselves.
Last year, a team in the US discovered that copper has the potential to turn carbon dioxide into a sustainable fuel.
The scientists at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis took previous studies showing that oxidised copper had been effective as a catalyst for creating propanol, ethanol and ethylene and used this to explore the production of biofuels.
They found that producing biofuels was possible by using solar cells to feed electrons to active sites into a copper catalyst.
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