The latest renewable energy invention might be as green as it gets. Researchers from Harbin Institute of Technology in China and the University of Bristol have created droplet-based biological factories made of living photosynthetic algae. By jam-packing the algae into sugary droplets of water, they produced hydrogen instead of oxygen when exposed to sunlight. The international team hopes to scale up the system so it can be used as an alternative future energy source.
Hydrogen can be a carbon-neutral fuel. However, making it requires using a lot of electricity. So, if it’s not made with renewable energy, it’s not so eco-friendly. That’s why researchers are searching for more green alternatives – and finding potential candidates such as the algae droplet discovery.
How It Works:
- The team trapped around 10,000 algal cells in a droplet, then crammed a bunch of droplets together by osmotic compression.
- The confined situation left the cells so oxygen-deprived that they switched on hydrogenases – enzymes that hijack the normal photosynthetic pathway to produce hydrogen for energy. (Under normal conditions, photosynthetic algal cells convert carbon dioxide into oxygen.)
- To boost the amount of hydrogen the cells churn out, the scientists coated the living micro-reactors with a thin film of oxygen-consuming bacteria – thus increasing algae cells’ reliability to produce hydrogen.
The research is still just beginning, but the work provides a path towards photobiological green energy development under natural aerobic conditions.
Professor Stephen Mann, Co-Director of Bristol’s Max Planck Bristol Centre for Minimal Biology, said:
Using simple droplets as vectors for controlling algal cell organization and photosynthesis in synthetic micro-spaces offers a potentially environmentally benign approach to hydrogen production that we hope to develop in future work.
Professor Xin Huang at China’s Harbin Institute of Technology added:
Our methodology is facile and should be capable of scale-up without impairing the viability of the living cells. It also seems flexible; for example, we recently captured large numbers of yeast cells in the droplets and used the microbial reactors for ethanol production.
Water droplet sized factories surely won’t end our energy crisis. But if the team can get the idea to work on an industrial scale, it could drive down the cost of hydrogen fuel, which could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
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