Sustainable bio-hydrogen production via engineered microbial metabolism

In 2022, carbon emissions from the chemical industry peaked at 935 M ton, making this industry the third largest sector by emissions and responsible for 2.5% of total greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.

Addressing this environmental impact whilst pivoting existing chemical manufacturing routes away from diminishing fossil resources is now a critical challenge facing scientific research.

Industrial biotechnology has emerged as an elegant solution to this challenge, where genetically programmed microorganisms can be designed using modern synthetic biology techniques to enable the bio-production of industrial products from sustainable feedstocks via fermentation.

In this PhD project, laboratory bacteria will be metabolically engineered to generate H2 (a prolific industrial petrochemical generated via steam reforming) from sustainable feedstocks, including lignin and PET plastic waste.

After initial synthetic biology optimisations in Year 1, these microbial processes will be intensified using roboticized combinatorial DNA assembly and microscale fermentation optimisations at the Edinburgh Genome Foundry (https://www.ed.ac.uk/biology/research/facilities/edinburgh-genome-foundry) in Year 2, before translating these findings in Year 3 into bioreactors and conducting process optimisation studies at bioprocess facilities in Scotland and at our industrial collaborator Dstl.