Research Team to Study Photosynthetic Bacteria for Making Biofuels

In Colorado State University, an interdisciplinary team of researchers has received a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to study new ways to increase the productivity of the cultivation of photosynthetic bacteria towards sustainable production of biofuels and other targeted molecules.

The team composed of faculty members from the departments of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Biology will focus its research on cyanobacteria, blue-green bacteria that can convert carbon dioxide into hydrocarbons through photosynthesis. The team will engineer cyanobacteria to make it grow faster in a wide range of industrial conditions.

In addition, the CSU researchers will explore how exposure to light in a variety of settings affects the growth rate and yield of the bacteria; create computer models that predict the light exposure in specific cultivation systems; develop a method to efficiently harvest the cyanobacteria from the culture; and develop new life-cycle analysis approaches that will allow accurate modeling of the productivity of large-scale reactors.

The team will build small-scale models of different photobioreactor strategies in CSU labs to model the large-scale production reactors and research the physiological response of cyanobacteria to photobioreactor conditions.