Science
Related: About this forumBionic leaf turns sunlight into liquid fuel
Nocera, the Patterson Rockwood Professor of Energy at Harvard University, and Pamela Silver, the Elliott T. and Onie H. Adams Professor of Biochemistry and Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School, have co-created a system that uses solar energy to split water molecules and hydrogen-eating bacteria to produce liquid fuels.
The paper, whose lead authors include postdoctoral fellow Chong Liu and graduate student Brendan Colón, is described in a June 3 paper published in Science.
This is a true artificial photosynthesis system, Nocera said. Before, people were using artificial photosynthesis for water-splitting, but this is a true A-to-Z system, and weve gone well over the efficiency of photosynthesis in nature.
While the study shows the system can be used to generate usable fuels, its potential doesnt end there, said Silver, who is also a founding core member of the Wyss Institute at Harvard University.
The beauty of biology is its the worlds greatest chemist biology can do chemistry we cant do easily, she said. In principle, we have a platform that can make any downstream carbon-based molecule. So this has the potential to be incredibly versatile.
Dubbed bionic leaf 2.0, the new system builds on previous work by Nocera, Silver, and others, which though it was capable of using solar energy to make isopropanol faced a number of challenges. Chief among those, Nocera said, was the fact that the catalyst used to produce hydrogen a nickel-molybdenum-zinc alloy also created reactive oxygen species, molecules that attacked and destroyed the bacterias DNA. To avoid that, researchers were forced to run the system at abnormally high voltages, resulting in reduced efficiency.
more...http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/06/bionic-leaf-turns-sunlight-into-liquid-fuel/
HuckleB
(35,773 posts)Bill USA
(6,436 posts)In the bionic leaf, the hydrogen gas is fed to a metabolically engineered version of a bacterium called Ralstonia eutropha. The bacteria combine the hydrogen with carbon dioxide as they divide to make more cells, and thenthrough a trick of bioengineering pioneered by Anthony Sinskey, professor of microbiology and of health sciences and technology at MITproduce isopropanol (rubbing alcohol), which can be burned in an engine much like the gasoline additive ethanol.
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Ultimately, though, Silvers goal is not to create fuels from this work, but high-value commodities in remote places. ...
Drugs, on the other hand, are high-value commodities, so engineering a bacterium to produce ... a vitamin or a drug may be her next goal for this system.
eastwestdem
(1,220 posts)Bill USA
(6,436 posts).. and other hydrocarbon fuels from brackish water and CO2 (as comes from industrial smoke stacks)...
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1127102538