CO2 Conversion On Overdrive, Scientists Create Synthetic Scrubber 20 Times Better Than Plants

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is one of the most common gasses in the earth’s atmosphere, courtesy of emissions from decaying organic substance and the mountains of wastes that both humans and animals often produce. With the rise in carbon levels in recent decades, scientists have been scrambling to find a way to reduce those levels. It would seem that they finally succeeded.

Plants normally play the biggest role when it comes to converting carbon dioxide into useful chemicals and gasses, but they are just too slow at this point, Researchgate reports. This is why scientists had to create a new method that utilizes enzymes that could convert CO2 faster than plants. The result is a pathway that helps speed up the conversion process by up to 20 times.

The team published their findings on Science magazine, detailing how they used 17 different enzymes from 9 organisms that naturally converted CO2 to create a pathway that is significantly more efficient than organic methods. The team is led by Tobias Erb, who is a specialist in microbiology and works Max Planck Institute.

“When provided with energy in the reaction tube, this designer pathway is able to continuously fix atmospheric CO2,” Erb told Researchgate. “So we’ve demonstrated that it is possible to rationally design new pathways for CO2-fixiation by following basic chemical rules and that such pathways can be optimized by including biological design principles.”

Right now, the team is unable to apply the process to actual organisms, but existing data is encouraging, Futurism reports. Once carbon conversion efficiency has been increased, it could result in all kinds of beneficial results, including the creation of new ways to feed livestock. There’s also the matter of actually manipulating the rate at which useful chemical compounds are created, including sugar, which is what CO2 is normally converted into by plants.