Team:Worldshaper-Nanjing/Description
Worldshaper-Nanjing
Description
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Settleable Biological Carbon Fixed System (Version 1.0)
Backgroud and Move
Increasing level of carbon dioxide (CO2) in earth's atmosphere is the main reason of global warming. As a result of human activity, atmospheric levels of CO2 have increased by ~25% over the past 150 years. Thus, it has become increasingly important to slow down the accumulation rate or reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in atmosphere. There are two main directions to address this problem: reducing the emissions at source or increasing sequestrations at downstream. There’re plenty of new technologies including employing carbon-free energy resources and improving traditional energy efficiency，and also many international policies like Kyoto Treaty to control CO2 emissions. Although we have now made great success in this way and will go much further, the huge market requirement, technological limitations and diversity of development phase of countries drag ours foot a lot. And traditional carbon fixation technologies like chemical or physical adsorptions, membrane separations and cryogenic distillations are always high-cost and small scale, and believed to be not environmentally and economically sustainable.
Photosynthetic organisms use solar energy to generate reducing equivalents and incorporate atmospheric CO2 into organic molecules is one of the main approaches in carbon cycle and carbon sequestration. Because of their limitation of living area and characteristics of metabolism, trees and other plants can only use carbon dioxide slowly and in a much smaller scale, however microalgae commonly known as “seaweed” have many advantages, like fast growing, vast living area(water area covers over more than 70% of the earth’s surface), higher photosynthetic efficiency and stronger capability of environmental adaptation, which make it to be a high efficiency, large scale, environment friendly and sustainable biological approach of using algae for carbon sequestration.
Details
To date, numerous systems based on algae for carbon fixation have been developed, most of them mainly focused on the waste water treatment or the producing of useful biomass and needed to be cultured in a controlled environment.
Here, we hope to develop an irreversible biological carbon fixed system through genetic engineering upon a kind of seaweed Synechococcus sp, which would be used to fix carbon dioxide high efficiently in vast wild nature environment. First the algae was overexpressed its ribulose 1, 5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase to improve the capability of CO2 capturing and conversion. Meanwhile six genes involved in cellulose synthesis from Gluconacetobacter xylinus were transferred to help the host to produce cellulose more efficiently. And further a metal binding peptide from plant was fused with host’s pili protein and also its main protein of gas vesicle GVPA was abolished, so the final engineered strain was expected to absorb metal irons and shrink its gas vesicle to help the algae to sink to seabed when matured. Through these modifications, we want build a powerful and highly adaptable algae strain capable of producing cellulose self-sinking, which would cut off carbon reuse in a relatively long time.
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