What could go wrong? ~cr
Feat could turn bacteria into biological factories for energy and even food.
The bacterium Escherichia coli has been engineered to grow by consuming carbon dioxide.Credit: Steve Gschmeissner/SPL
E. coli is on a diet. Researchers have created a strain of the lab workhorse bacterium — full name Escherichia coli — that grows by consuming carbon dioxide instead of sugars or other organic molecules.
The achievement is a milestone, say scientists, because it drastically alters the inner workings of one of biology’s most popular model organisms. And in the future, CO2-eating E. coli could be used to make organic carbon molecules that could be used as biofuels or to produce food. Products made in this way would have lower emissions compared with conventional production methods, and could potentially remove the gas from the air. The work is published in Cell1 on 27 November.
“It’s like a metabolic heart transplantation,” says Tobias Erb, a biochemist and synthetic biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, Germany, who wasn’t involved in the study.
Plants and photosynthetic cyanobacteria — aquatic microbes that produce oxygen — use the energy from light to transform, or fix, CO2 into the carbon-containing building blocks of life, including DNA, proteins and fats. But these organisms can be hard to genetically modify, which has slowed efforts to turn them into biological factories.
By contrast, E. coli is relatively easy to engineer, and its fast growth means that changes can be quickly tested and tweaked to optimize genetic alterations. But the bacterium prefers to grow on sugars such as glucose — and instead of consuming CO2, it emits the gas as waste.
Ron Milo, a systems biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and his team have spent the past decade overhauling E. coli’s diet. In 2016, they created2 a strain that consumed CO2, but the compound accounted for only a fraction of the organism’s carbon intake — the rest was an organic compound that the bacteria were fed, called pyruvate.
Full proof of concept paper here.
If this bug got loose it would have to outcompete the existing bugs out there in order to survive. With that 18 hour doubling time it would be screwed in the real world. I smell another “How can we cash in on all that grant money going to climate change in order to study our favourite bug?” scheme.
If this isn’t a hoax I will eat my hat. To convert carbon dioxide to energy containing organic molecules requires energy; light in the case of photosynthesis. The original article says the energy will be “gleaned from formate”. How will the formate to provide this energy be made?
This whole farrago contradicts the principle of the conservation of energy. The only thing they have got right is to use the correct singular noun “bacterium”.
Yes, enthalpy determines whether this is even possible. In the latest work, it appears that the energy comes from formate.
Oh dear…a proof of concept? Well ok…
“The work is a “milestone” and shows the power of melding engineering and evolution to improve natural processes, says Cheryl Kerfeld, a bioengineer at Michigan State University in East Lansing and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.”
Melding? Surely you mean meddling with engineering and evolution to improve natural processes…blah blah blah.
Cheryl, where is this extra 9.96% CO2 going to come from for this PoC to work?
Now only if CO2 had anything detrimental to do with the atmosphere of the planet…
Perhaps this is an application looking for a solution to something – hey I know doesn’t Venus have an exorbitant amount of CO2?
Hey, I thought greens hate GMOs?
In this case, CO2 is only a fractional input, with the actual “food” being the pyruvate.
CO2 cannot be a food, strictly speaking, because you cannot get any energy from it.
It is already fully oxidized.
In plants, the actual food is sunlight, if we take good to mean source of energy.
CO2 is more like The raw material for plants.
We do not consider oxygen to be food for us, do we?
The reaction of pyruvate with CO2 should be very familiar with anyone who recalls first year biochemistry, or even high school level biochem: It occurs in microorganisms in a process called fermentation.
It is endothetmic, meaning energy must be added, in this case as a molecule of atp, along with the CO2, with the usual end product being ethanol. It will not react with CO2 under aerobic conditions because the favored reactions with O2 present is normal Kreb cycle oxidation which PRODUCES CO2!
So to grow these bacteria you need to prepare some pyruvate and also add another source of energy, and you wind up making something which is going to wind up oxidizing to CO2 eventually anyhow.
Basically you are reducing the CO2 partially via an energy intensive process which must be managed carefully in a specific environment:lots of pyruvate or purification acid, CO2 in high concentration, no or very little oxygen, and a source of a to which has to come from metabolizing something else.
It may be a technical masterpiece of genetic manipulation, but it is a rubegolbergian method at best for temporarily converting some CO2 into some other molecule which will be converted back to CO2 unless it is somehow sequestered and stored away somewhere forever.
Oh and which btw used up far more everyman can be recovered, and requires an ongoing industrial chemical synthesis to be sustained.
There ain’t no pyruvate lakes lying around to just toss some of these bugs into so they can soak up some CO2.
Pyruvate is a common intermediate because it is so reactive u see so many sorts of conditions. As such it exists in cells for a tiny moment before becoming something else.
So I do not see this becoming some Frankenstein or zombie apocalypse nightmare. More likely it would immediately due outside of a lab or other place designed just for it.
This may be the dumbest “cure ” for global warming since tree shaped industrial reactors were thought experimented into existence.
As noted aboce, we already got CO2 absorption covered, using completely natural solar powered devices that are self replicating cover the Earth in vast profusion, look beautiful, taste great, can be used for building materials, nutritional supplies for every thing in Earth, decorations , soil stabilizers, oxygen factories, shading homes and streets, absorbing excess soil moisture, atmospheric humidification (which moderates global temperatures exceedingly well), and all manner of other great feats of Chemical Festivus Strength.
Now, with yet another civilization ending crisis averted, time to go up to the attic and dig out my Festivus Pole.
Aluminium.
Great strength to weight ratio!
+1
Hi N. McGinley, – “… no lakes of pyruvate …” was also my immediate take on the original post’s project practicality. Well it seems pyruvate can be obtained secreted in media from at least 1 strain of algae, namely a Sphingomonas strain “A” ( with it’s particular plasmid). As per (2014) “Bacterial pyruvate production from alginate … “; originally published in Journal of Bioscience & Bioengineering, 117(3) & available on-line as free full text.
The media (“lake”) is yeast extract plus some nutrients [0.1% of each of the following (NH4)2SO4 & KH2PO4 & Na2HPO4 & MgSO4]. Maximum pyruvate production rate was when 5% alginate (by weight/volume) is put in this media, inoculated (w/strain
“A”) & subsequently aerated.
After 2-3 days in bio-reactor the S. strain “A” no longer metabolizes the alginate. Still, what is noteworthy is that this method does not require glucose to make pyruvate & the alginate substrate is naturally abundant.
Yeast extract is not difficult to prepare & yeast reproduce well enough. I have not calculated whether all the ancillary ingredient costs make this unreasonably expensive once add in original post’s tactical method.
Nice “End of the World” scenario.
Did some work with companies working on genetically engineering bacteria, none of them could survive outside of an in-vitro environment, they were attacked and destroyed by natures darwinian evolved bacteria, it’s a dog eat dog world out there in microbe land.
This is just a good way to get funding from the greedy dumb green blob investors.
that sounds like the craziest most irresponsible thing one could possibly conceive
yup, angela mooooerkels germans at it to destroy the world again
ja but we haf closed ze door and windows of ze building you know, ja
The ecoli that they transform into insulin has not escape and caused massive insulin shock. I think people read way, way to much science fiction and not enough science.
(Nor has it caused the zombie apocalypse, a Frankenstein monster, or any other science fi idea. Sorry, it just doesn’t work that way.)
How many E. coli do you need to outcompete plants. And when the plants go what do we eat? E. coli soup anyone?
The link to the “proof of concept paper” just goes to an article. The paper is here. It isn’t really as described. The reducing substrate is formate. This is oxidised to CO2. In the process, it reduces other CO2, which it uses for biomass. It isn’t clear what the net absorption of CO2, if any, is. And of course a large scale supply of formate isn’t obvious.
The header article is not a very good summary.
Reading more about this, it turns out these e coli need 100,000 ppm of CO2, and formate.
Once you have made concentrated CO2, why try to feed it to bacteria to get rid of it or make fuel?
And yes the formate needs to be manufactured as well.
So two separate highly expensive industrial manufacturing processes just to keep some very slowly reproducing bacteria alive?
This project is about genetic modifications, not CO2.
Making the 100,000 ppm CO2 is how to get rid of it, if you want to spend money to do that.
They are hoping the bacteria will somehow evolve to live in ambient CO2, but this seems to be incredibly wishful and ignorant thinking.
A careful read reveals these bugs will just eat sugar if there is any.
If course they will, if still able…because there is energy to be had in sugar.
and could potentially remove the gas from the air.
So potential extinction of all life.
Where’s Greta
Isn’t this proposal coming from the same people who demonstrate outside grocery stores because of GMO foods? Now they want to GM the bacteria in our guts? The people they revere as scientists could no more predict what would happen when Rabbits were introduced onto a continent where they had no known predators, or what would happen when certain wasps or other insects are introduced? First let’s get the problem of Kudzu (google it if it’s an unfamiliar word) under control if cured is too ambitious.
“Isn’t this proposal coming from the same people who demonstrate outside grocery stores because of GMO foods?”
No.
No but it is brought to you by the same team that attempted to reinvent the wheel.*
*More than 500 species of protist have been identified in Antarctic waters, ~350 of which are phytoplankton and ~150 microheterotrophs (Scott and Marchant, 2005).
I get real tired of reading all the snide remarks about folks who write and promote such idiotic solutions to reducing CO2 in our robust atmosphere. Do you ever tire of it?
You make fun of these deceitful soul without mercy. Leave them alone. What haven’t they tried to do to you?
Yes, they all have wasted grant money’s and private as well. All along, wasting electricity in the labs, flying in planes, trains and automobiles.
For goodness sake, leave the simple alone.
It is the season.
How the hell do they turn this off when it achieves the design goal, what ever that might be?
We have more CO2 in the atmosphere every year because more people are able to buy products that use electricity and cars and the like.
Wonderful!
The biologists have engineered an E. Coli strain to fix CO2 by utilizing formate (CO2H2) which produces CO2 as a byproduct! The process is CO2 neutral except the CO2 and heat required to produce the formate substrate.
Much ado about nothing.