10073574Engineering cyanobacteria into bio-solar cell factories for scalable carbon capture utilisation and storageClosedCollaborative R&DInnovate UKGlobally, 40 billion tonnes of CO2 are emitted every year, which is the primary driver for anthropogenic climate change. CO2 removal and avoidance offer a plausible solution for climate change mitigation. However, the commercially available technologies to capture CO2 are highly energy intensive, chemical based (environmentally unfriendly and often toxic) and require further compression of CO2, which needs expensive storage and transportation infrastructure, rendering these processes unsustainable and economically unfeasible. Biobased carbon capture utilisation and storage (CCUS) is a method of CO2 capture via biomass production using biological organisms - primarily photosynthetic organisms such as plants and microalgae including cyanobacteria. CyanoCapture Ltd., the project lead, is an innovative SME aiming to develop a sustainable and cost-effective solution for point source carbon capture by combining novel photobioreactor processes and improved cyanobacteria genetics. In this project, CyanoCapture is collaborating with the McCormick lab at the University of Edinburgh to jointly apply world-class genetic engineering strategies to i) understand and enhance CO2 fixation pathways for enhancing CO2 capturing efficiency and ii) transform the use of biobased CCUS for industrial CO2 capture and climate mitigation into a reality. Photosynthetic cyanobacteria are ubiquitous and account for 30-50% of environmental CO2 fixation. Cyanobacteria are naturally far more efficient than plants at capturing CO2 and hence are excellent candidates for scalable carbon capture. The cyanobacterium _Syn_3154 is a fast-growing, high biomass accumulating strain with a doubling time of less than 3 hours, with no need for external supplementation of vitamins for its growth -- meaning that it carries the potential to be an excellent candidate to enable mass-scale CO2 removal if we can engineer it to be optimised for taking CO2 from flue gas. In addition, it is highly genetically tractable and hence can be engineered as a competent microbial chassis for efficient conversion of CO2 to biomass and value-added chemicals that offer not only long-term carbon sequestration, but also additional economic and societal benefits. Our strategy to engineer Syn3154 to improve the CO2 fixation rate and deployment of technology for industrial scale capture at point source emissions has a strong potential to elevate the UK's position at the forefront of the global Net-Zero transition.