Engineered microbial biofuel production and recovery under supercritical carbon dioxide
Name
s41467-019-08486-6.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.06 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
5fc99bd92a6bc76b08db136ebaa6e359
Author(s)
Boock, Jason T
Freedman, Adam JE
Tompsett, Geoffrey A
Muse, Sarah K
Allen, Audrey J
Jackson, Luke A
Castro-Dominguez, Bernardo
Timko, Michael T
Prather, Kristala LJ
Thompson, Janelle R
Date Issued
2019
Journal
Nature Communications
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Version
Final published version
Abstract
© 2019, The Author(s). Culture contamination, end-product toxicity, and energy efficient product recovery are long-standing bioprocess challenges. To solve these problems, we propose a high-pressure fermentation strategy, coupled with in situ extraction using the abundant and renewable solvent supercritical carbon dioxide (scCO 2 ), which is also known for its broad microbial lethality. Towards this goal, we report the domestication and engineering of a scCO 2 -tolerant strain of Bacillus megaterium, previously isolated from formation waters from the McElmo Dome CO 2 field, to produce branched alcohols that have potential use as biofuels. After establishing induced-expression under scCO 2 , isobutanol production from 2-ketoisovalerate is observed with greater than 40% yield with co-produced isopentanol. Finally, we present a process model to compare the energy required for our process to other in situ extraction methods, such as gas stripping, finding scCO 2 extraction to be potentially competitive, if not superior.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Chemical Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/S41467-019-08486-6
