Engineering sustainable routes to carbon capture and reusage: Conversion of CO2 from steelworks to coating products.

发展可持续、可再生的工业流程的必要性至关重要，也是人类面临的最重要的全球挑战之一。塔塔钢铁在其位于南威尔士塔尔博特港的工厂生产涂层钢产品，该工厂目前每年排放700万吨二氧化碳。对欧盟排放交易制度的拟议修改和类似二氧化碳排放上限的实施，将给英国钢铁业带来巨大的财务和环境负担。氰化物、塔塔钢铁和诺丁汉大学目前正在开发一种新的制造工艺，将塔塔钢铁厂排放的废二氧化碳转化为高价值的化学品，特别是涂层，然后可以在钢铁工艺中使用。拟议的博士项目将建立在这种合作的基础上，通过操纵蓝藻的微生物生化和调控途径，使光能高效转化为产品。主要目标是在蓝藻中表达非异源途径，并结合动态调节将代谢流重新定向到提高生产率。工程菌株将接受代谢组学鉴定(代谢表型)，使用基于液色谱(LC)-质谱仪(MS)的方法来估计细胞内和细胞外的代谢通量，从而开发出生产率更高的设计菌株。然后，这些设计菌株将与氰化物公司合作，在连续发酵中进行特征描述，从而开发出具有代表性的栽培策略。这个多学科项目在实验室规模的光生物反应器中集成了生物物理表征、基于LC-MS的代谢概况和通量分析、合成生物学以及工艺开发和优化。

The need to develop sustainable, renewable Industrial processes is crucial and one of the foremost global challenges facing humanity. Tata Steel generates coated steel products at their plant in Port Talbot, South Wales, a site which currently emits 7 million tonnes of CO2 per year. Proposed changes to the EU Emissions Trading System and the implementation of similar CO2 emission caps will present significant financial and environmental burdens for the UK steel industry. Cyanetics, Tata Steel and the University of Nottingham are currently developing a novel manufacturing process to convert the waste CO2 emissions from the Tata Steels plant into high value chemicals, specifically coatings, which can then be utilised in the steel process,The proposed PhD project will build on this collaboration by manipulating the microbial biochemical and regulatory pathways of Cyanobacteria to enable efficientphoto-energy conversion to product. The primary objective being to express non-heterologous pathways in Cyanobacteria, coupled with dynamic regulation to redirect metabolic flux towards increased productivity. Engineered strains will be subject to metabolomic characterisation (metabolic phenotyping) using liquid chromatography (LC)-mass spectrometry (MS)-based methods to estimate intra and extracellular metabolic fluxes, allowing for the development of a designer strain with improved productivity. These designer strains will then be characterised in continuous fermentation in collaboration with Cyanetics, allowing development of a representative cultivation strategy. This multi-disciplinary project integrates biophysical characterisation, LC-MS-based metabolic profiling and flux analysis synthetic biology, and process development and optimisation, in bench scale photobioreactors.