The abstract isn't too jargon-laden (though I wonder why they say photosynthesis is inefficient), and makes an amusing comparison with "Discovery May Lead to the Creation of Biofuel from CO2 in the Atmosphere." Or you don't want to laugh you can cry. Photosynthesis makes the biofuels. This is a clever way of generating other chemicals. Kudos to Keller et al for thinking of using extremophiles.
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Extremophile genetic engineering
This story suggested they can make fuel from CO2. A little closer look a the article suggests that the editor had a bit of THC in his CO2. Executive summary: an extremophile microorganism that lives by ocean vents was modified to use CO2, provided you feed it some hydrogen. Potentially you could more readily synthesize various industrial chemicals that way; they got one of the big 12 so far.
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The Wiki article on photosynthetic efficiency is interesting:
"100% sunlight → non-bioavailable photons waste is 47%, leaving
"53% (in the 400–700 nm range) → 30% of photons are lost due to incomplete absorption, leaving
"37% (absorbed photon energy) → 24% is lost due to wavelength-mismatch degradation to 700 nm energy, leaving
"28.2% (sunlight energy collected by chlorophyl) →
"32% efficient conversion of ATP and NADPH to d-glucose, leaving
"9% (collected as sugar) → 35–40% of sugar is recycled/consumed by the leaf in dark and photo-respiration, leaving
"5.4% net leaf efficiency.
"Many plants lose much of the remaining energy on growing roots. Most crop plants store ~0.25% to 0.5% of the sunlight in the product (corn kernels, potato starch, etc.). Sugar cane is exceptional in several ways to yield peak storage efficiencies of ~8%."
Interesting stuff there about cyanobacteria, too, and carbon sequestration.
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