Question

Name: Section: Homework 3 Applied Microbial Metabolism & discussion). (10 pts). Due in class on Conduct an internet search on 3 of the following 4 topics. Choose an appropriate article from a good (or at least reasonable) quality source. Write a summary of that article in your own words. Include the full URL 1. Topic: (microbial) Bioremediation Title: URL: Summary: 2. Topic: Microbial artificial Photosynthesis Title URL: Summary: 3. Topic: Microalgae biofuel production Title: URL: Summary: 4. Topic: Microbial biofuels (not microalgae) Title: URL: Summary:

Answer 1

1.Title : Understanding and Designing the Strategies for the Microbe-Mediated Remediation of Environmental Contaminants Using Omics Approaches

URL : https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2018.01132/full

Summary : Recently, the modern approaches such as genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and fluxomics have been applied to the systems biology of microbial consortia with in diverse array environments.

These approaches have made it practically possible and economically feasible to explore the metagenomes of contaminated environmental samples, harboring diverse microbial communities.

Environmental biologists deem microbial bioremediation to be one of the potent tools to eliminate environmental contaminants (Bell et al., 2014; Chemerys et al., 2014; Roling, 2015).

Advances in molecular and technologies to gauge microbial communities and bioremediation at xenobiotic/anthropogen contaminated sites.

To elucidate how, different omic-approaches can be applied to microbial-mediated bioremediation applications, here in this section, we have tried to mention some of the success stories of different approaches in microbial bioremediation.

These studies provide an estimate regarding the potential metabolic activities of the microbial consortia but give little insight into the microbes responsible for bioremediation.

the advent of NGS methods and in silico analyses have enabled the environmental microbiologists to address these problems and has helped them to open up the microbial; in contaminated environments (Maphosa et al., 2010).

2. Title : Cyborg Bacteria Could Be the Key to Commercially Viable Artificial Photosynthesis

URL : https://futurism.com/cyborg-bacteria-could-be-the-key-to-commercially-viable-artificial-photosynthesis/amp

Summary : Sakimoto, a researcher at Peidong Yang’s lab at the University of California, Berkeley, has come up with a new alternative to natural photosynthesis: cyborg bacteria that were trained to cover themselves in solar panels that are much more efficient than chlorophyll at converting sunlight into useful compounds.

While he does acknowledge that more research is needed, Sakiomoto is hopefully that his cyborg bacteria could prove to be a viable alternative to fossil fuels, helping the world produce energy more cheaply and cleanly.

“Rather than rely on inefficient chlorophyll to harvest sunlight, I’ve taught bacteria how to grow and cover their bodies with tiny semiconductor nanocrystals,” Sakimoto said in a press release.

4. Title : Microbial Biofuels: Current Production and Future Prospects

URL : https://microbewiki.kenyon.edu/index.php/Microbial_Biofuels:_Current_Production_and_Future_Prospects

Summary : After maintaining and rediluting that culture for four days, they quantified the relative concentrations of the plasmids in each culture, and found that certain efflux pumps can confer resistance to biofuels, and that (at least in the case of limonene production) the pump also improves the efficiency of biofuel production in a limonene production strain.

Ethanol produced via sugarcane fermentation has a much higher reported NEB than corn ethanol, yielding almost eight times as much biofuel energy compared to the required input of fossil fuel energy.

Because ethanol is not compatible with most modern engines when used alone (it must be mixed with another fuel), a lot of research has been done to clone entire metabolic pathways, introduce them to relevant organisms for biofuel production, and optimize them for industrial purposes.

Microbial biofuel production is already in use, principally in the form of sugar fermentation by yeast to produce ethanol .

Although the production of growth-inducing ATP is a natural function of glycolysis, in this industrial setting the creation of undesired biomass is essentially an unwanted byproduct, and represents wasted carbon and energy resources which could have gone into increased ethanol production .

coli, introducing many different efflux pumps from different species of microbes to investigate whether or not the pumps would improve the organism’s ability to survive biofuel stress, and determine whether it would improve biofuel production .

All biofuels with a positive NEB should theoretically emit less carbon dioxide, because the process of carbon fixation occurring within the growing plants should counterbalance the carbon dioxide emissions of both the invested fossil fuel energy and the combustion of ethanol .

Although many microbes have been used in ethanol production, the yeast species Saccharomyces cerevisiae is primarily used in industry, using starch and sugars from plants as the starting material for the process .

Although this problem can be somewhat resolved by immobilizing the yeast cells to retard cell growth, the consequence of slowing growth is that the intracellular ATP concentration quickly increases, and the accumulation of this product of glycolysis downregulates the entire glycolytic pathway, thereby decreasing ethanol production .

Both corn ethanol and sugarcane ethanol require an input of fossil fuel energy in order to produce them because of the energy requirements of farming, processing, and transportation.

Strains of Zymomonas mobilis capable of inefficient xylose fermentation were cultured for an extended period of time in medium containing both glucose and xylose, to select for the ability to ferment xylose more efficiently.

Although there is no biofuel option currently available which solves all of the economic and environmental issues associated with fossil fuels, the potential for both “fine-tuning” biofuel-producing microbes, and genetically modifying species to be able to efficiently make use of otherwise useless materials and byproducts, makes microbial biofuels an appealing target for research .