Cyanobacteria+DIY bio

[PatrickG]

I was pondering the use of organisms in DIYbio, and I was wondering
what people think of the use of cyanobacteria in this field.
I see a few potential advantages:

1) They are autotrophic, so no worries about feeding them (maybe
this can help reduce contamination)
2) Many are diazotrophic, so they can even use N2 (maybe a cool
DIY project can take advantage of this?)
3) They live an en enormous variety of habitats, so we could use
alkaliphilic, thermophilic strains to even further reduce
contamination (or maybe for the fun of it), or we could use a
mesophilic strain
4) While some produce toxins, I don't think any are pathogenic,
and we can try to avoid strains producing toxins.

I can see some difficulties too, so it'd be cool to hear from anyone
experienced with this... I'm not quite sure if it's easy enough to
manipulate them.. (should be easy enough to culture them though). And
with the colloquial name "blue green algae" they shouldn't really stir
too much false alarm.


What does everyone here think?

[Ravasz]

Hi there,

I have not actually worked with cyanobacteria, but they are my
personal favourite for promising DIYbio target. They are said to be
easy to culture, some strains are edible, they are autotrophic and
they can be easily modified genetically. Many tests have been made
with them (some are still ongoing) but I consider them as a possible
future food and oxigen source in confined spaces. The russians have
already experimented with this in the 60's, and the thing actually
works: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS-3 (here they used Chlorella
though, which is completely different from cyanobacteria)

My idea would be to develop some small, easy to handle cultivating
system wth which one can culture cyanobacteria at home. Then one could
say, "Hey, I have done my part for the environment, in this fridgelike
machine I produce all the oxigen I consume in my daily life". I know
it sounds silly at first, but I see a lot of potential in small scale
cultivation of cyanobacteria.

I would be interested in more down to earth solutions as well, so I'll
keep an eye on this thread.

Cheers,
Mat

[Cathal Garvey]

AFAIK there are no cyanobacteria that produce ethanol naturally. Nor
have I heard of any being engineered to produce ethanol; there'd be a
lot of work involved just making them survive ethanol, let alone produce
useful amounts.

What they *can* do out of the box is produce lots of oil, under the
right conditions. The main problem facing people who want to make
biodiesel in this way is that the conditions don't suit mass-production
yet. For example, many strains of algae and cyanobacteria will only
bother making lots of oil if their growth is constrained somehow but
energy is still available, conditions that lean towards "batch-mode"
production systems rather than a convenient continuous-flow system.

On 25/07/12 05:44, JOETHEJOEGUY wrote:
> i am also interested in cultivating cyanobacteria. does anyone know of a
> strain that produces a significant amount of ethanol, and preferably no
> other toxins?

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[Mega]

>For example, many strains of algae and cyanobacteria
>will only bother making lots of oil if their growth is constrained
> somehow but energy is still available, conditions that lean towards "batch-mode"
> production systems rather than a convenient continuous-flow system.

Yeah, their generation time is exploding when they produce oil. Maybe one could change that by changing the promotor?!

Or just add chloramphenicol. AFAIK, it makes that the cells do not divide any more (plasmids do, maybe oil production is enforced too?).

[Mega]

Cathal, do you by chance  know if Cyanobacteria will handle E.Coli plasmids (such as pUC and pVIB)?

I mean, they are both Gram- , so the chance would be higher imho... (?)

Or do I just have to try?

[joseph matthews]

apparently a company called algenol has engineered cyanobacteria that do produce significant amounts of ethanol. how difficult would it be for me to replicate their process on a much smaller scale?

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[Cathal Garvey]

I strongly doubt it.. I think Cyanobacteria diverged from proteobacteria
long enough ago that their promoter structure and codon bias is probably
pretty different.

[Cathal Garvey]

Well, I stand corrected: that's pretty interesting!
Honestly, without knowing more about their process it's impossible to
say how much work is involved. It could be a quick hack of a gene or
two, or it might involve extensive modifications to preserve the cells
against ethanol-induced cell death while ramping up production.

It is also possible that they're not revealing some critical issues with
the technology, which I'd expect with cyanobacteria: ethanol
fermentation is normally a response to anoxic conditions, but
photosynthesis produces oxygen as a byproduct. This would suggest to me
that the better the conditions are for photosynthesis, the worse they
are for fermentation of alcohol. Perhaps that's a whole artificial
genetic regulatory system unto itself?

[Meow-Ludo]

They might have used yeast genes

[Mega]

> how difficult would it be for me to replicate their process on a much smaller scale?

If you can find a paper describing how it works, and you get the plasmids, then quite easily (in sense you just have to do some restriction and ligation)

Or, what I like better: If gene synthesis were cheaper, you could look at their paper, identify the genes needed, look their sequence up and have it printed out. For the ethanol thing, depending on the lenght you may pay 1500-7000 $ for gene synthesis nowadays... If you've got a rich uncle, that would be the way to go ;)