Power-to-Protein: Carbon Fixation with Renewable Electric Power to Feed the World

Abstract

Akanksha Mishra is currently a PhD student at the University of Tubingen in Germany. She is working in the field of gas fermentation under the supervision of Prof. Angenent. For her thesis, she is developing the power-to-protein system by operating a two-stage bioprocessing system. She is originally from India and moved to Germany after the completion of her undergraduate studies in biotechnology. She obtained a master’s degree in applied environmental geosciences also at the University of Tubingen. Dr. Jean Nepomuscene Ntihuga is a post-doctoral research associate at University of Tubingen, Germany in the Environmental Biotechnology Group at the Center of Applied Geosciences. He conducts research on chain elongation, especially in downstream process optimization. He worked on designing bioreactors during his doctoral research at the University of Hohenheim. With a background in chemical engineering, his research focused on application of engineering principles in the conversion of wastes to useful products and its impact on the environment. His goal is to help alleviate poverty and climate change mitigation through scale-up of developed processes and its application in decentralized systems. Dr. Bastian Molitor studied biology at the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, where he also obtained his PhD. Afterward, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the RWTH Aachen University, before he moved on to a two-year research stay at Cornell University. Since 2017, Dr. Molitor has been a group leader at the University of Tubingen. His research focuses on the utilization of anaerobic gas-fermenting microbes for biotechnology. He studies the potential to genetically engineer acetogenic bacteria and methanogenic archaea, as well as the integration of bioprocesses with non-genetically engineered microbes to extend the product spectrum of gas fermentation. Prof. Dr. Ir. Largus Angenent leads the Environmental Biotechnology Group at the Center of Applied Geosciences at the University of Tubingen (Germany), where he holds a Humboldt Professorship. His group studies the recovery of carbon from wastewaters and industrial off gases with bioprocessing. The microbial catalysts can be pure cultures (including genetic modification), defined mixed cultures, or open cultures (microbiomes). His group also studies extracellular electron transfer, and he was one of the founding members of ISMET. Angenent is an expert on gas fermentation and chain elongation, and he started companies in these areas (Electrochaea, GmbH and Capro-X, Inc.).