Plug'n Play Photosynthesis for Rubisco Independent Fuels

用清洁、可再生的燃料满足世界能源需求也许是人类面临的最紧迫的科学和政治挑战。撞击地球表面的太阳能足以满足这些需求。事实上，我们目前的经济是建立在燃烧廉价化石燃料的基础上的，化石燃料是古代光合作用的遗迹。不幸的是，我们对这些燃料的使用率远远超过了它们的产量，而且还以潜在的环境可接受的速度产生二氧化碳。因此，必须开发新的途径来从太阳能直接生产化学燃料，即能量存储分子。生物系统通过光合作用的发展解决了这个问题。然而，生物体的进化是为了生物适应性，而不是为了人类的燃料生产。在强光条件下，催化CO2固定中的限速步骤的酶RuBisCO变得饱和。在这些条件下，卡尔文循环变得下调，吸收的大部分光能作为热量损失。需要新的策略来提高这种光能的利用率以生产燃料。我们解决这个问题的策略是创建一个跨细胞的即插即用平台，使我们能够将电子从光合源细胞分流到独立设计的燃料生产模块沿着纳米线（这些可以是基于微生物的，部分甚至完全合成）。该项目代表了一种激进的方法，通过电气连接工程模块化分工来增强和超越自然中观察到的光合作用策略

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