A.Sri Dithya

ChemE5870: Energy Seminar I

Net id:sa929

The speaker, Lars Angenent gave us a brief detail about biotechnology with microbiomes for biochemical production,including fuels from biomass.In the seminar the speaker discussed about environmental biotechnology like the anaerobic digestion,Syngas fermentation and microbial electrochemistry.The speaker was successful in keeping the audience involved.The presentation started with brief explanation of environmental biotechnology wherein various processes like anaerobic digestion were explained.Anaerobic digestion is a series of biological processes in which microorganisms break down biodegradable material in the absence of oxygen. Other few processes which were discussed in the presentation include microbial electrochemistry which is the study and application of interactions between living microbial cells and electrodes,Syngas fermentation where a mixture of hydrogen,carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide known as syngas is used as carbon and energy sources and then converted into fuel and chemical by microorganisms.Main takeaway from these processes would be that open culture,that is ,reactor microbiomes can produce biochemicals at high selectivities and rates(besides methane).One of the applications of this process is biorefinery platforms which involves hydrolysis and intermediate steps.Few of the examples being the sugar platform,syngas platform and carboxylate platform which involves primary and secondary fermentation.The overview of the process involves breaking down the solid polymers to monomers and oligomers,that is,sugars which are further processed to obtain oxidized products and intermediates like short-chain carboxylates,ethanol which on further processing would yield the end products.
The advantages of using these reactor micro biomes(open cultures) are removal of microbial products from food web,complex waste changes resulting in metabolic flexibility,avoiding the sterilization of waste as they are open cultures,Oxygen removal and no need to buy enzymes in microbial hydrolysis.The only disadvantage of these open cultures is the limited end product spectrum.The wasted biomass and undistilled ethanol can be used to achieve specialty oils.The process of chain elongation with reactor micro biomes was explained using acetic acid example wherein we could see the chain elongation from 2 carbons to 8 carbon containing n-caprylic acid,the intermediates including n-butyric acid(4 carbons) and n-caproic acid(6 carbons).ncaproate production is similar to methane production but value is 20 times higher.
In conclusion,we can produce ad separate a soluble chemiacl with high ratesand selectivities by reactor microbiomes.The speaker provided a good overview of the applications of micro biomes in biochemical production with suitable experimental results which helped the audience in understanding the applications much further in depth.