E.coli Bacteria Can Now Eat Carbon Dioxide To Release Biofuel, And Help Reduce Global Warming

When you hear of the word E.coli -- the first thing that will come to your mind will be the dangerous life-threatening disease.

But only a very small percentage of E.coli is harmful, and researchers have found a way to make E.coli work towards healing the planet and help us humans.

Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, have created a strain of E.coli bacterium that actually eats carbon dioxide. In case you didn¡¯t know, E.coli usually feasts on sugars.

However, scientists were able to create this unique kind of E.coli in the lab that would in the future help create biofuels while lowering emission footprint as opposed to conventional methods.

Plants are known to use photosynthesis to generate energy from the light and transform it to produce energy and release carbon dioxide. E.coli normally consumes sugars and releases CO2 as waste.

Researchers were able to create the CO2 by literally putting it on a diet. First, they gave the bacteria genes that encode a pair of enzymes that would allow photosynthetic organisms to turn CO2 into organic carbon. Usually, plants and other cyanobacteria power this transformation with the help of light, but this wasn¡¯t working out for E.coli. To circumvent this, the team inserted a gene that allowed the bacteria gleam energy through an organic molecule dubbed formate.

This too didn¡¯t seem to work. However, researchers didn¡¯t give up. They further tweaked the strain they cultured successive generation of E.coli for a year by giving them minimal quantities of sugar to feast on while dosing them with concentrated CO2.

It took 200 days but the first cells that were able to use CO2 as their only carbon source surfaced. Moreover, as 300 days passed by, the bacteria grew faster than the sugar consuming counterparts.

While this is still at a very early stage, this milestone research could help in producing clean renewable energy in the future.