The prediction of the world's future energy consumption and global climate change makes it desirable to identify new technologies to replace or augment fossil fuels by environmentally sustainable alternatives. One appealing sustainable energy concept is harvesting solar energy via photosynthesis coupled to conversion of CO2 into chemical feedstock and fuel. In this work, the production of ethylene, the most widely used petrochemical produced exclusively from fossil fuels, in the model cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 is studied. A novel instrumentation setup for quantitative monitoring of ethylene production using a combination of flat-panel photobioreactor coupled to a membrane-inlet mass spectrometer is introduced. Carbon partitioning is estimated using a quantitative model of cyanobacterial metabolism. The results show that ethylene is produced under a wide range of light intensities with an optimum at modest irradiances. The results allow production conditions to be optimized in a highly controlled setup.

Department of Adaptive Biotechnologies Global Change Research Centre Academy of Science of the Czech Republic Drásov Czech Republic

Department of Life Sciences Imperial College London London United Kingdom

Institut für Theoretische Biologie Humboldt Universität zu Berlin Berlin Germany

Photon Systems Instruments spol s r o Drásov Czech Republic

Citace poskytuje Crossref.org

A quantitative description of light-limited cyanobacterial growth using flux balance analysis

Towards a quantitative assessment of inorganic carbon cycling in photosynthetic microorganisms

Spectrophotometric Determination of Phycobiliprotein Content in Cyanobacterium Synechocystis

Optimizing cyanobacterial product synthesis: Meeting the challenges