SEES Fellows: Wastewater treatment with commodity chemical producing cyanobacterial biorefineries

这个跨学科项目将研究一种新的方法，将对环境有害的废水营养物质转化为生物质和商品化学物质-赖氨酸。转基因蓝藻菌株将被测试它们在厌氧消化废水样本上生长的能力。然后，赖氨酸的生物合成途径将被改造为过度生产和分泌大量有价值的商品化学品。将进行比较的生命周期评估，以确定与目前基于处置的系统相比的环境和经济效益。最近食品和能源价格的上涨，以及环境退化的越来越多的证据表明，需要一种方法来有效地处理和再利用我们富含化肥的废物流。拟议的工作有可能改变化学品合成和废物评估的方式，并有助于普遍了解细菌的分解代谢。这项研究的重点是让我们的社会摆脱对化石燃料化学品的依赖的一个根本障碍，开发新的基于废物蒸气的原料，这些原料的消费具有积极的价值。利用这些废物流生产产品将使经济格局转向可持续地利用可再生资源生产产品。该项目还将包括一系列教育活动，目的是吸引高中生和本科生进入可持续发展科学领域。该项目由NSF科学、工程和教育促进可持续发展研究员(SEE FERLOS)计划支持，目标是帮助实现必要的发现，为导致环境、能源和社会可持续发展的行动提供信息，同时培养必要的劳动力来应对这些挑战。在SEES研究员的支持下，该项目将使有前途的早期职业研究人员能够在与可持续发展相关的独立研究生涯中站稳脚跟。

This interdisciplinary project will investigate a novel approach for converting environmentally detrimental wastewater nutrients into biomass and the commodity chemical -lysine. Genetically modifiable strains of cyanobacteria will be tested for their ability to grow on anaerobic digestate wastewater samples. The -lysine biosynthetic pathway will then be engineered to overproduce and secrete large quantities of the valuable commodity chemical. A comparative life cycle assessment will be performed to determine environmental and economic benefits over current disposal based systems. Recent increases in food and energy prices, along with mounting evidence of environmental degradation, has demonstrated the need for a way to efficiently treat and reuse our chemical fertilizer rich waste streams. The proposed work has the potential to both transform the manner in which chemicals are synthesized and waste is evaluated, along with contributing to the general understanding of catabolism in bacteria. The research focuses on a fundamental barrier to weaning our society off of fossil fuel based chemicals, developing new waste stream-based feedstocks that have a positive value built into their consumption. Harnessing these waste streams for product output would tip the economic landscape towards the sustainable production of products from renewable resources. This project will also include a series of educational activities with the goal of attracting high school and undergraduate students into the field of sustainability science. This project is supported under the NSF Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability Fellows (SEES Fellows) program, with the goal of helping to enable discoveries needed to inform actions that lead to environmental, energy and societal sustainability while creating the necessary workforce to address these challenges. With SEES Fellows support, this project will enable a promising early career researcher to establish themselves in an independent research career related to sustainability.