Applications of Synthetic Biotechnology on Carbon Neutrality Research: A Review on Electrically Driven Microbial and Enzyme Engineering

Abstract

With the advancement of science, technology, and productivity, the rapid development of industrial production, transportation, and the exploitation of fossil fuels has gradually led to the accumulation of greenhouse gases and deterioration of global warming. Carbon neutrality is a balance between absorption and emissions achieved by minimizing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from human social productive activity through a series of initiatives, including energy substitution and energy efficiency improvement. Then CO2 was offset through forest carbon sequestration and captured at last. Therefore, efficiently reducing CO2 emissions and enhancing CO2 capture are a matter of great urgency. Because many species have the natural CO2 capture properties, more and more scientists focus their attention on developing the biological carbon sequestration technique and further combine with synthetic biotechnology and electricity. In this article, the advances of the synthetic biotechnology method for the most promising organisms were reviewed, such as cyanobacteria, Escherichia coli, and yeast, in which the metabolic pathways were reconstructed to enhance the efficiency of CO2 capture and product synthesis. Furthermore, the electrically driven microbial and enzyme engineering processes are also summarized, in which the critical role and principle of electricity in the process of CO2 capture are canvassed. This review provides detailed summary and analysis of CO2 capture through synthetic biotechnology, which also pave the way for implementing electrically driven combined strategies.

Bioconversion of CO2 and potential of gas fermentation for mainstream applications: Critical advances and engineering challenges

“…Similarly, François et al [ 59 ] have discussed the capability of microbial systems to optimize carbon conversion and enhance carbon yield for ease in commercialization. Another review by Zhuang et al [ 60 ] describes a novel chemoenzymatic system that converts carbon dioxide to methanol and ultimately to starch using a multi‐step enzymatic reaction. This combines advances in synthetic biology and electrochemistry to design novel systems for efficient CO 2 conversion.…”

Synthetic biology promotes the capture of CO2 to produce fatty acid derivatives in microbial cell factories

“…However, challenges such as high energy consumption, hazardous catalysts, and high substrate purity make it difficult to carry out efficiently in the conversion process only by chemical methods (Munkajohnpong et al 2020 ; Salehizadeh et al 2020 ; Woo, 2017 ). The emergence of an optically coupled microbial system provides a potential new solution to solve these problems (Sullivan et al 2021 ; Zhuang et al 2022a ; Yang et al 2022 ). For example, Bai et al ( 2021 ).…”

BayesianSSA: a Bayesian statistical model based on structural sensitivity analysis for predicting responses to enzyme perturbations in metabolic networks

“…Chemical production using microbes, known as chemical bioproduction, has attracted attention as a key technology in a decarbonized society. Chemical bioproduction is expected to be essential for sustainable development [1], such as the production of medicines [2,3], fuels [4], and foods [5], and the absorption of CO2 [6,7]. For efficient chemical bioproduction, computational designs of metabolic networks are typically employed to reduce the cost of comprehensive wet lab experiments [8,9].…”