Abstract
Recycling of carbon dioxide (CO2) into fuels and chemicals is a potential approach to reduce CO2 emission and fossil-fuel consumption. Autotrophic microbes can utilize energy from light, hydrogen, or sulfur to assimilate atmospheric CO2 into organic compounds at ambient temperature and pressure. This provides a feasible way for biological production of fuels and chemicals from CO2 under normal conditions. Recently great progress has been made in this research area, and dozens of CO2-derived fuels and chemicals have been reported to be synthesized by autotrophic microbes. This is accompanied by investigations into natural CO2-fixation pathways and the rapid development of new technologies in synthetic biology. This review first summarizes the six natural CO2-fixation pathways reported to date, followed by an overview of recent progress in the design and engineering of CO2-fixation pathways as well as energy supply patterns using the concept and tools of synthetic biology. Finally, we will discuss future prospects in biological fixation of CO2.
Highlights
Energy and the environment are two major issues that are closely related to human life
The burning of fossil fuels has resulted in the massive release of carbon dioxide into the earth’s atmosphere, which has generated worldwide concern regarding the associated greenhouse effect
Designing an efficient CO2-fixation pathway is the ultimate aim of synthetic biology, but is still faced with great challenges at the current stage
Summary
Energy and the environment are two major issues that are closely related to human life. The Calvin cycle (Figure 1A), as the most important CO2-fixation pathway in nature from which all crop biomasses obtain their carbon, has attracted great attention from researchers (Stitt et al, 2010) It exists widely in plants, algae, cyanobacteria, and other organisms and is driven by light. There are two CO2-fixing enzymes in this cycle: acetyl-CoA carboxylase and propionyl-CoA carboxylase Another archaeal aerobic CO2-fixation pathway discovered in 2007 is the 3-hydroxypropionate-4-hydroxybutyrate cycle, which is driven by sulfur and hydrogen (Figure 1F) (Berg et al, 2007). This cycle synthesizes one molecule of acetyl coenzyme A from two molecules of HCO3–, four molecules of ATP, and four equal molecules of NAD(P)H.
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