Bacteria Engineered to Turn Carbon Dioxide Into Liquid Fuel

ScienceDaily (Dec. 11, 2009) — Global climate change has prompted efforts to drastically reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas produced by burning fossil fuels.

Genetically engineered strains of the cyanobacterium Synechococcus elongatus in a Petri dish. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of California - Los Angeles)

In a new approach, researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have genetically modified a cyanobacterium to consume carbon dioxide and produce the liquid fuel isobutanol, which holds great potential as a gasoline alternative. The reaction is powered directly by energy from sunlight, through photosynthesis.

The research appears in the Dec. 9 print edition of the journal Nature Biotechnology and is available online.

This new method has two advantages for the long-term, global-scale goal of achieving a cleaner and greener energy economy, the researchers say. First, it recycles carbon dioxide, reducing greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the burning of fossil fuels. Second, it uses solar energy to convert the carbon dioxide into a liquid fuel that can be used in the existing energy infrastructure, including in most automobiles.

While other alternatives to gasoline include deriving biofuels from plants or from algae, both of these processes require several intermediate steps before refinement into usable fuels.

"This new approach avoids the need for biomass deconstruction, either in the case of cellulosic biomass or algal biomass, which is a major economic barrier for biofuel production," said team leader James C. Liao, Chancellor's Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UCLA and associate director of the UCLA-Department of Energy Institute for Genomics and Proteomics. "Therefore, this is potentially much more efficient and less expensive than the current approach."

Using the cyanobacterium Synechoccus elongatus, researchers first genetically increased the quantity of the carbon dioxide-fixing enzyme RuBisCO. Then they spliced genes from other microorganisms to engineer a strain that intakes carbon dioxide and sunlight and produces isobutyraldehyde gas. The low boiling point and high vapor pressure of the gas allows it to easily be stripped from the system.

The engineered bacteria can produce isobutanol directly, but researchers say it is currently easier to use an existing and relatively inexpensive chemical catalysis process to convert isobutyraldehyde gas to isobutanol, as well as other useful petroleum-based products.

In addition to Liao, the research team included lead author Shota Atsumi, a former UCLA postdoctoral scholar now on the UC Davis faculty, and UCLA postdoctoral scholar Wendy Higashide.

An ideal place for this system would be next to existing power plants that emit carbon dioxide, the researchers say, potentially allowing the greenhouse gas to be captured and directly recycled into liquid fuel.

"We are continuing to improve the rate and yield of the production," Liao said. "Other obstacles include the efficiency of light distribution and reduction of bioreactor cost. We are working on solutions to these problems."

The research was supported in part by a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.

Breakthrough in 'Spintronics' Could Lead to Energy Efficient Chips

Silicon spin sandwich. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Twente)

ScienceDaily (Dec. 7, 2009) — Scientists from the MESA Institute for Nanotechnology of the University of Twente and the FOM Foundation have succeeded in transferring magnetic information directly into a semiconductor. For the first time, this is achieved at room temperature. This breakthrough brings the development of a more energy efficient form of electronics, so-called 'spintronics' within reach. The results are published on November 26 in Nature.

So far, information exchange between a magnetic material and a semiconductor was only possible at very low temperature. The successful demonstration of information exchange at room temperature is a pivotal step in the development of an alternative paradigm for electronics. The main advantage of this new 'spintronics' technology is the reduced power consumption: in present-day computer chips, excessive heat production is already a problem, and this will soon become a limiting factor.

Digital by nature

Unlike conventional electronics that employs the charge of the electron and its transport, spintronics exploits another important property of the electron, namely the 'spin'. The sense of rotation of an electron is represented by a spin that either points up or down. In magnetic materials, the spin orientation can be used to store a bit of information as a '1' or a '0'. The challenge is to transfer this spin information to a semiconductor, such that the information can be processed in new spin-based electronic components. These are expected to operate at lower power consumption, since computations such as reversing the electron spin, require less power than the usual transport of charge.

Only a few atomic layers thick

To achieve an efficient information exchange, the researchers insert an ultra thin -- less than one nanometer thick -- layer of aluminum oxide between the magnetic material and the semiconductor: this corresponds to only a few atomic layers. The thickness and quality of this layer are crucial. The information is transferred by applying an electric current across the oxide interface, thereby introducing a magnetization in the semiconductor, with a controllable magnitude and orientation.

Importantly, the method works for silicon: the prevalent electronic material for which highly advanced fabrication technology is available. The researchers found that the spin information can propagate into the silicon to a depth of several hundred nanometers. This is sufficient for the operation of nanoscale spintronic components, according to researcher Ron Jansen. Now the next step is: to built new electronic components and circuits and use these to manipulate spin information.

The spintronics research is performed by a team of researchers led by Ron Jansen at the MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology, and is made possible by financial support from the Foundation FOM and a VIDI-grant received from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091127124519.htm