H₂ E.coli

Hydrogen Production from Sugar-rich Waste by E.coli.

Abstract

Our project aims to produce hydrogen from garbage efficiently using Escherichia coli. Today, large quantities of glucose-rich food and drinks are trashed without being reused as energy. To extract energy from and reuse this nutritious garbage, we focused on the E. coli intrinsic metabolic system related to synthesis of hydrogen from glucose via formic acid. However, the amount of produced hydrogen is small when this intrinsic system is used as it is. To solve this problem, we tried to activate the latter part of this metabolic system, the formic acid-hydrogen pathway as our main project. Hydrogen production from formic acid is performed by the FHL complex in E. coli. Thus, we aimed to activate this glucose-hydrogen pathway by overexpressing the fhlA,－gene which promotes the transcription of FHL, on a plasmid. We also tried to reproduce results from previous research which claims mutagenesis of fhlA helps improve hydrogen production. We succeeded in transforming fhlA into a BioBric vector, and making E. coli which overexpress fhlA. We confirmed that E. coli that overexpresses fhlA produces three times more hydrogen than wild type E. coli. We also confirmed that in our experiment mutation introduced in fhlA was uninvolved in improvement of hydrogen production. In conclusion, our result revealed that overexpression of fhlA contributes to be improvement of hydrogen production of E. coli.

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Results

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Background

System

Results

Discussion