Chemoautotrophic organisms for efficient negative emissions technologies

Project Lead:

Overview:

Chemoautotrophic microorganisms from some archaeal phylums are known to have the most efficient microbial carbon fixation pathways. These aerobic microbes oxidise ammonia to nitrite and use the resultant energy to fix CO2 to biological forms of carbon. Despite their efficiency at carbon fixation, these microorganisms are poorly understood with only a handful of characterised strains. To harness the biological carbon capture potential of these phyla, this project sources novel lineages of archaeal microorganisms to examine their carbon fixation pathways using either culture-based or genomic/metagenomic approaches.

The project aims to characterise the diversity in these pathways and identify the most efficient ammonia-oxidation/CO2 fixation rates for downstream biotechnology applications towards negative emissions. This approach represents a low energy, low cost, non-toxic emissions mitigation solution that could be powered by industrial waste streams. Furthermore, the genetic potential for carbon fixation identified in this project has the potential to be applied in industrially-friendly model systems of well-characterised microorganisms (including S. cerevisiae or E. coli).