Eight Up-Coming Biotech Tools to Combat Climate Crisis.

Biotechnology has a high potential to substantially contribute to a low-carbon society. Several green processes are already well established, utilizing the unique capacity of living cells or their instruments. Beyond that, the authors believe that there are new biotechnological procedures in the pipeline which have the momentum to add to this ongoing change in our economy.

Comparison of Carbonic Anhydrases for CO Sequestration.

Strategies for depleting carbon dioxide (CO) from flue gases are urgently needed and carbonic anhydrases (CAs) can contribute to solving this problem. They catalyze the hydration of CO in aqueous solutions and therefore capture the CO. However, the harsh conditions due to varying process temperatures are limiting factors for the application of enzymes.

Design and engineering of artificial microbial consortia for biohydrogen production.

In natural microbial ecosystems the metabolic diversity of the organisms enables interaction among the community members and allows them to engage in syntrophic interactions. With regard to biotechnology, artificial microbial consortium engineering is used to improve productivities and yields of bioprocesses. However, to achieve supreme productivity or efficiency at industrial scale, defined ecosystems must be physiologically well-selected to meet eco-biotechnological demands.

Biohydrogen production beyond the Thauer limit by precision design of artificial microbial consortia.

Dark fermentative biohydrogen (H) production could become a key technology for providing renewable energy. Until now, the H yield is restricted to 4 moles of H per mole of glucose, referred to as the "Thauer limit". Here we show, that precision design of artificial microbial consortia increased the H yield to 5.

Controlled enzymatic hydrolysis and synthesis of lignin cross-linked chitosan functional hydrogels.

This study presents a novel fully enzymatic process for the controlled depolymerisation of fungal and shrimp chitosan, and their subsequent use in the synthesis of lignin cross-linked chitosan (CTS) hydrogels. Cellobiosehydrolase (CBH) was used to depolymerize CTS resulting in decrease in average molecular weight (Mw) of shrimp CTS from 140 kDa and degree of deacetylation (DD %) from 91.3% to an average MW of 15 kDa and 16% DD.