Plug and Play Photosynthesis for Rubisco Independent Fuels

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Supplying the world's energy needs with a clean, renewable fuel is perhaps the most pressing scientific and political challenge facing humanity. The solar energy hitting the earth's surface is more than sufficient to fulfill these needs. In fact, our current economy is predicated on the burning of cheap fossil fuels, relics of ancient photosynthesis. Unfortunately, our rate of use of these fuels far outstrips their production, and is also producing carbon dioxide at potentially environmentally acceptable rates. Thus, it has become essential to develop new routes to directly produce chemical fuels, i.e. energy storage molecules, from solar energy. Biological systems solved this problem through the development of photosynthesis. However, organisms have been evolved for biological fitness, not for human fuel production. Under high light conditions, RuBisCO, the enzyme catalyzing the rate limiting step in CO2 fixation, becomes saturated. Under those conditions, the Calvin Cycle becomes down-regulated and the majority of light energy absorbed is lost as heat. New strategies are needed to improve utilization of this light energy to produce fuels. Our strategy to solve this problem is to create a trans-cellular, plug-and-play platform that allows us to shunt electrons from photosynthetic source cells to independently engineered fuel production modules along nanowires (these could be microbial based, partly or even totally synthetic). The project represents a radical approach to augment and surpass photosynthetic strategies observed in Nature by engineering modular division of labor through electrical connectivity