Researchers have engineered Escherichia coli bacteria to grow by taking in carbon dioxide, according to a paper published today (November 27) in Cell.
E. coli are normally heterotrophs—organisms that ingesting organic compounds such as glucose for food—but the new study shows that they can be turned into autotrophs that consume carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turn it into biomass.
“I find it fundamentally amazing that an organism which evolved over billions of years to live a heterotrophic lifestyle can so quickly and completely change into an autotroph,” Dave Savage, a biochemist at University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved with the study, tells The Scientist in an email. “It suggests that metabolism is extremely malleable.”
This process of using inorganic carbon to make biomass, called carbon fixation, could be used to solve “some of the biggest challenges of humanity today,” Ron Milo, a systems biologist at the Weizmann ...
