Cestellos-Blanco Stefano, Friedline Skyler, Sander Kyle B, Abel Anthony J, Kim Ji Min, Clark Douglas S, Arkin Adam P, Yang Peidong
Center for the Utilization of Biological Engineering in Space, Berkeley, CA, United States.
Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, United States.
Front Microbiol. 2021 Jul 28;12:700010. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2021.700010. eCollection 2021.
Providing life-support materials to crewed space exploration missions is pivotal for mission success. However, as missions become more distant and extensive, obtaining these materials from resource utilization is paramount. The combination of microorganisms with electrochemical technologies offers a platform for the production of critical chemicals and materials from CO and HO, two compounds accessible on a target destination like Mars. One such potential commodity is poly(3-hydroxybutyrate) (PHB), a common biopolyester targeted for additive manufacturing of durable goods. Here, we present an integrated two-module process for the production of PHB from CO. An autotrophic process converts CO to acetate which is then directly used as the primary carbon source for aerobic PHB production by . The uses H as a reducing equivalent to be generated through electrocatalytic solar-driven HO reduction. Conserving and recycling media components is critical, therefore we have designed and optimized our process to require no purification or filtering of the cell culture media between microbial production steps which could result in up to 98% weight savings. By inspecting cell population dynamics during culturing we determined that suitably proliferates in the presence of inactive . During the bioprocess 10.4 mmol acetate L day were generated from CO by in the optimized media. Subsequently, 12.54 mg PHB L hour were produced by in the unprocessed media with an overall carbon yield of 11.06% from acetate. In order to illustrate a pathway to increase overall productivity and enable scaling of our bench-top process, we developed a model indicating key process parameters to optimize.
为载人太空探索任务提供生命保障物资对任务成功至关重要。然而，随着任务距离越来越远、范围越来越广，通过资源利用获取这些物资至关重要。微生物与电化学技术的结合为从一氧化碳（CO）和水（H₂O）这两种在火星等目标目的地可获取的化合物生产关键化学品和材料提供了一个平台。一种这样的潜在商品是聚（3-羟基丁酸酯）（PHB），一种用于耐用消费品增材制造的常见生物聚酯。在此，我们展示了一种从CO生产PHB的集成双模块工艺。一个自养过程将CO转化为乙酸盐，然后乙酸盐直接用作[具体微生物名称]进行需氧PHB生产的主要碳源。[具体微生物名称]利用氢气（H₂）作为还原当量，通过电催化太阳能驱动的水还原产生。保存和循环利用培养基成分至关重要，因此我们设计并优化了我们的工艺，使其在微生物生产步骤之间无需对细胞培养基进行纯化或过滤，这可节省高达98%的重量。通过检查培养过程中的细胞群体动态，我们确定[具体微生物名称]在无活性的[另一种微生物名称]存在下能适当增殖。在生物过程中，[具体微生物名称]在优化培养基中从CO产生10.4 mmol乙酸盐/（升·天）。随后，[具体微生物名称]在未处理的培养基中以12.54 mg PHB/（升·小时）的速度生产，乙酸盐的总碳产率为11.06%。为了说明提高整体生产力并实现我们的台式工艺规模化的途径，我们开发了一个模型，指出了关键的工艺参数以进行优化。
