{"id":26910,"date":"2019-11-30T04:00:12","date_gmt":"2019-11-30T04:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.englishforums.com\/news\/?p=26910"},"modified":"2019-11-30T04:00:12","modified_gmt":"2019-11-30T04:00:12","slug":"scientists-create-bacteria-that-eat-co2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/scientists-create-bacteria-that-eat-co2\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists create bacteria that process CO2 into eco-friendly biofuels"},"content":{"rendered":"

Scientists\u00a0have created a strain of the lab workhorse bacteria that grows by consuming carbon dioxide (CO2<\/sub>) instead of sugars or other organic molecules.<\/strong>
\nAccording to a paper published in\u00a0Cell<\/a>, the bacterium (full name\u00a0Escherichia coli) has been engineered by scientists to consume carbon dioxide instead of sugar which could be used to produce biofuels in the future.<\/strong>
\nThis was done by scientists at\u00a0the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel to convert carbon dioxide to energy for themselves while generating biomass that can be used as biofuel.
\nScientists\u00a0<\/a>said they hope to tap synthetic life-forms to convert atmospheric carbon dioxide, into food, fuel and organic chemicals that humans can use.
\nAlthough while the study comes with a major limitation, the research team hopes their work can provide a foundation for carbon-neutral energy sources in the future. Notably, because previous attempts, like a 2016 effort to synthesize sugar from CO2 <\/sub>in bacteria, saw little success.
\nRon Milo who led the research explained that the team didn’t expect to be able to make such remarkable changes to the bacteria’s genome.<\/p>\n

How the bacteria work<\/h2>\n

According to reports<\/a>, Milo and his team in the latest work used a mix of genetic engineering and lab evolution to create a strain of\u00a0E. coli\u00a0that can get all its carbon from CO2<\/sub>.<\/strong>
\nFirst, they gave the bacterium genes that encode a pair of enzymes that allow photosynthetic organisms to convert CO2<\/sub>\u00a0into organic carbon.
\nPlants and cyanobacteria power this conversion with light, but that wasn\u2019t feasible for\u00a0E. coli. Instead, Milo\u2019s team inserted a gene that lets the bacterium glean energy from an organic molecule called formate.
\nEven with these additions, the bacterium refused to swap its sugar meals for CO2<\/sub>. To further tweak the strain, the researcher’s cultured successive generations of the modified E. coli for a year, giving them only minute quantities of sugar, and CO2<\/sub>\u00a0at concentrations about 250 times those in Earth\u2019s atmosphere.
\nThey hoped that the bacteria would evolve mutations to adapt to this new diet. After about 200 days, the first cells capable of using CO2<\/sub>\u00a0as their only carbon source emerged. And after 300 days, these bacteria grew faster in the lab conditions than did those that could not consume CO2<\/sub>.
\nThe CO2<\/sub>-eating, or autotrophic,\u00a0E. coli\u00a0strains can still grow on sugar and would use that source of fuel over CO2<\/sub>, given the choice, says Milo. Compared with normal\u00a0E. coli, which can double in number every 20 minutes, the autotrophic\u00a0E. coli\u00a0are laggards, dividing every 18 hours when grown in an atmosphere that is 10 percent CO2<\/sub>. They are not able to subsist without sugar on atmospheric levels of CO2<\/sub>\u00a0currently 0.041percent.<\/p>\n

People\u2019s reaction to the new discovery<\/h2>\n

Milo and his team hope to make their bacteria grow faster and live on lower levels of CO2<\/sub>. They are also trying to understand how E. coli evolved to eat CO2,<\/sub>\u00a0changes in just 11 genes seemed to allow the switch, and they are now working on determining how.
\nShmuel Gleizer, the research first author and a researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science, in a press release expressed the difficulty they had to go through to achieve this scientific feat.<\/strong>
\nFrank Sargent, a researcher at Newcastle University, described the technology as one with endless possibilities, saying:
\nThis type of directed evolution is already a Nobel prize-winning type of science and this is a terrific example of why.
\nCheryl Kerfeld, a bioengineer at Michigan State University in East Lansing and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, expressed his support for the work stating it is a milestone ahead and is evidence of the power of melding engineering and evolution to improve natural processes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Scientists\u00a0have created a strain of the lab workhorse bacteria that grows by consuming carbon dioxide (CO2) instead of sugars or other organic molecules. According to a paper published in\u00a0Cell, the bacterium (full name\u00a0Escherichia coli) has been engineered by scientists to consume carbon dioxide instead of sugar which could be used to produce biofuels in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":26911,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,25],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26910"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26910"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26910\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26911"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}