SEES Fellows: Wastewater treatment with commodity chemical producing cyanobacterial biorefineries

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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.