Energy Joint Genome Institute ( Mpi ) For Terrestrial...

This is the introduction and presents the problem the paper addresses. Now a team from the Max-Planck-Institute (MPI) for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, Germany, by tapping the DNA synthesis expertise of the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI), has reverse engineered a biosynthetic pathway for more effective carbon fixation. This novel pathway is based on a new CO2-fixing enzyme that is nearly 20 times faster than the most prevalent enzyme in nature responsible for capturing CO2 in plants by using sunlight as energy. The study was published in the November 18, 2016 issue of Science. We had seen how efforts to directly assemble synthetic pathways for CO2-fixation in a living organism did not succeed so far, said Tobias Erb of MPI, who led the study. So we took a radically different, reductionist approach by assembling synthetic principal components in a bottom-up fashion in a test tube The team started with several theoretical CO2-fixation routes that coul d result in continuous carbon cycling. But they didn t stop there. We did not restrict our design efforts to known enzymes, but considered all reactions that seemed biochemically feasible, Erb said. Unlike DNA sequencing, where the language of life is read from the genome of an organism, DNA synthesis entails first the identification of a particular genetic element -- such as an enzyme for fixing carbon from the atmosphere -- and writing and expressing that code in a new system. In the