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An international team of researchers from the UK and China has created droplet-based algal micro-reactors capable of aerobic or hypoxic photosynthesis at room temperature in air.
Electron microscope image of a densely packed droplet of hydrogen-producing algal cells. Scale bar: 10 micrometers. Image credit: Xin Huang, Harbin Institute of Technology.
“Our methodology is simple and should be able to increase the vitality of living cells without compromising,” said Professor Xin Huang, a researcher at the Harbin Institute of Technology.
“It also seems flexible; for example, we have recently captured a large number of yeast cells in the droplets and used microbial reactors to produce ethanol. “
Normally, algal cells fix carbon dioxide and produce oxygen by photosynthesis.
Professor Huang and colleagues used sugary droplets filled with living algal cells to generate hydrogen, rather than oxygen, by photosynthesis.
They trapped about 10,000 algal cells in each droplet, which were then massed together by osmotic compression.
By burying the cells deep within the droplets, the oxygen levels dropped to a level that activated special enzymes called hydrogenases that hijacked the normal photosynthetic pathway to produce hydrogen.
In this way, about a quarter of a million microbial factories, typically only a tenth of a millimeter, could be prepared in a milliliter of water.
To increase the level of hydrogen evolution, the researchers coated the living micro-reactors with a thin shell of bacteria, which were able to clean the oxygen and thus increase the number of algal cells predisposed for the activity of the ‘hydrogenase.
Although still in an early stage, the study represents a step towards the development of photobiological green energy under natural aerobic conditions.
“The use of simple droplets as vectors for controlling algal cell organization and photosynthesis in synthetic micro-spaces offers a potentially environmentally friendly approach to hydrogen production that we hope to develop in future work,” said the Professor Stephen Mann, co-director of the Max Planck Bristol Center for Minimal Biology.
The team’s work was published in the magazine Nature Communications.
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Z. Xu et al. 2020. Production of photosynthetic hydrogen from droplet-based microbial micro-reactors under aerobic conditions. Nat Common 11, 5985; doi: 10.1038 / s41467-020-19823-5
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