An Academia Sinica team has designed a cell-free means of biological fixation that could potentially speed up the process by which plants, and other living organisms that are capable of carbon fixation at scale, remove carbon dioxide from the Earth’s atmosphere.

According to the team from Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biological Chemistry, the absorption of carbon by photosythentic and lithoautotrphic organisms provides an effective means of reducing the effects of climate change.

However, as the cellular structure of organisms found in nature limits the speed at which they can absorb carbon, the team set out to create a cell-free method that could replicate the same process at a faster rate under laboratory conditions.

The results, published in the February edition of Nature Catalysis, showed that the cell-free process was able to fix carbon at a rate either equal to or faster than plants and other organisms.

In a statement, Taiwan’s top research institution said that synthetic carbon fixation systems like the one designed by the team could be pivotal to achieving global 2050 emissions targets by aiding the development of new carbon capture and storage technologies.

According to Academia Sinica, it took the team led by the institute’s President James Liao (???) seven years to produce its findings.

Paul Lin (???), a member of the research team, told CNA that the effectiveness of enzymes responsible for natural carbon fixation, such as the enzyme RuBisCO, could be lowered by oxygen as a result of photorespiration.

Lin said they adopted two oxygen-insensitive RuBisCO enzymes and 19 other enzymes from microorganisms to eliminate the effects of photorespiration from the equation.

The introduction of an oxygen-insensitive, self-replenishing carbon-fixation system with opto-sensing enabled the artificial control of the regeneration of cofactors to help the team sustain synthetic carbon fixation for 6 hours, the team said.

They added that the system also enables the harvest of carbon feedstock to manufacture pharmaceutical goods without using petrochemical technologies.

Lin said that the system designed by the team could be considered as a notable type of carbon-negative technique that could both reduce carbon emission and expand artificial carbon sinks, reservoirs that lowers the concentration of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by storing carbon-containing chemical compounds indefinitely.

Source: Focus Taiwan News Channel