Globally we are facing the combined challenges of operating within our planetary boundaries and in meeting our net-zero CO2 emissions target by 2050. Failure to meet these challenges risks economic, social, political, climate, food, water, and fuel security. To mitigate this, circular economic solutions are urgently required. The ability of photosynthetic organisms to use light, capture CO2 and drive complex biochemistry provides a powerful tool to meet these challenges.
Every 2 hours, Earth receives enough solar energy to power our global economy for a year. This solar energy is currently mainly used to produce heat, electricity and renewable fuels. However, solar energy can also be used to power direct light driven biochemistry to manufacture a broad range of valuable products from recombinant proteins to renewable fuels. The first step of all these processes is light capture by photosystem II (PSII).
The Centre for Solar Biotechnology is focused on developing highly efficient and highly scalable light driven industries based on single cell green algae, including Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Combining precision CRISPR engineering and atomic resolution cryo-EM is now opening the opportunity for structure guided design of high-efficiency cell lines for industrial application. Using these techniques our team has engineered a range of single, double and triple knockouts of the light harvesting proteins (LHCII) to generate novel PSII-LHCII super-complexes which are being evaluated for improved photosynthetic efficiency and atomic resolution structure (PSII core structure resolved to 3.5A).