Pulling carbon into seawater using engineered bacteria

Rock weathering, the breakdown and dissolving of rocks and minerals caused by their exposure to water, air, and biological life, is a major regulator of Earth’s atmospheric CO2 levels and climate. Scientists have asked if rock weathering could be accelerated to pull excess CO2 out of the atmosphere. However, current efforts to achieve this are still too slow to affect the global carbon balance or to be economically viable at industrial scale. Now, researchers at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, Harvard Medical School (HMS)’s Department of Systems Biology, and the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, engineered a solution to this problem. They showed in customized bioreactors with a continuous flow of seawater that an engineered marine bacterium sped up the weathering of a silicate mineral, boosting the amount of CO2that was removed from air. Their findings are published in Nature Biotechnology.

Raccontata daeurekalert.orglarepublica.pe