Berlin 2015 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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AKE: Arbeitskreis Energie

AKE 7: Bioenergy

AKE 7.2: Hauptvortrag

Dienstag, 17. März 2015, 10:00–10:30, A 151

Rational design of cyanobacteria for hydrogen production — •Sascha Rexroth — Lehrstuhl für Biochemie der Pflanzen, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum, Germany.

The solar-driven hydrogen production has tremendous potential as renewable and carbon-neutral energy source, since the substrate, water, and the energy source, sunlight, are virtually unlimited. Cyanobacteria, which perform oxygenic photosynthesis, can under certain conditions produce hydrogen using electrons extracted from water. Our goal is to improve the efficiency of hydrogen generation at the expense of biomass production. An important part is the efficient coupling of the linear photosynthetic electron transport from water to an imported, engineered hydrogenase. For this coupling the photosynthetic electron metabolism has to be engineered in many individual steps towards this goal. Engineering of ferredoxin-dependent pathways is a decisive step for re-routing electrons from water for hydrogen production instead of CO2-fixation. Optimization of photobioreactor systems and improved fermentation conditions are integral parts of the process design. Optimal culture conditions can be found and kept constant for several months by using continuous cultivation techniques which allow the systematic optimization of each individual parameter. Provided such systems are optimized both on the individual cell level and on the systems level, a more than 100-fold increase of hydrogen production in comparison with the most productive natural systems existing to date can be estimated, which would be a promising basis for an economically competitive H2 production.