High Performance Enzyme for Carbon Capture Inspired by Red Blood Cells

Innovation: Industry

Sapiem

2016

Image: Stacy Marie / Unsplash / CC BY SA - Creative Commons Attribution + ShareAlike

Capture, Absorb, or Filter Chemical Entities

Living systems often require chemical elements and chemical compounds, including complex sugars, proteins, and odor-making compounds, to perform critical activities. These compounds exist in various states–solid, liquid, and gas–and are ubiquitous in soil, water, and air. This requires that living systems not only have ways to capture, absorb, or filter them, but also ways to differentiate among them, selecting those that are valuable or harmful. For example, mangrove trees live with their roots in salty water and sediments. Various mangrove species have different strategies for removing salt from the water they take in so that their tissues can use the fresh water.

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Capture, Absorb, or Filter Energy

Energy is naturally available in many forms, including kinetic, potential, thermal, elastic, radiant, chemical, and more. All living systems require energy to carry out their many activities, and have developed strategies appropriate to one or more of those forms. For example, some plants maximize their surface area available for capturing radiant energy from the sun while others have strategies to focus scattered light onto photosynthesizing areas.

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Catalyze Chemical Breakdown

Life depends upon the building up and breaking down of biological molecules. Catalysts, in the form of proteins or RNA, play an important role by dramatically increasing the rate of a chemical transformation––without being consumed in the reaction. The regulatory role that catalysts play in complex biochemical cascades is one reason so many simultaneous chemical transformations can occur inside living cells in water at ambient conditions. For example, consider the 10-enzyme catalytic breakdown and transformation of glucose to pyruvate in the glycolysis metabolic pathway.

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Chemically Break Down Organic Compounds

The vast majority of biochemical assembly and breakdown processes–even by the most complex organisms–occur within cells. In fact, cells are able to perform hundreds, even thousands of chemical transformations at the same time under life-friendly conditions (ambient temperature and pressure in an aqueous environment). Part of the reason that decomposition reactions (chemical breakdown) can occur under such mild conditions is because most often, they occur in a stepwise, enzyme-mediated fashion, sipping or releasing small amounts of energy at each step. For example, the breakdown of glucose to pyruvate–and the release of energy–occurs in the 10-step enzyme catalyzed process of glycolysis.

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Patents

Industrial Lung by Sapiem is a non-toxic carbon capture process that uses a synthetic form of the enzyme carbonic anhydrase.

Benefits

Reduced CO2 emissions
Low energy consumption

Applications

Industrial manufacturing
Energy production

UN Sustainable Development Goals Addressed

Goal 7: Affordable & Clean Energy
Goal 11: Sustainable Cities & Communities

The Challenge

Greenhouse gases are at the highest levels ever recorded. These gases absorb solar energy and keep heat close to the Earth, a phenomenon known as the greenhouse effect. Carbon dioxide is the primary greenhouse gas and is emitted from burning materials like fossil fuels.

Innovation Details

Industrial Lung is a carbon capture solution that uses a synthetic carbonic anhydrase enzyme to dramatically accelerate CO2 capture. Unlike conventional carbon-capture technologies, the process neither requires nor produces toxic products. It is a carbon-capture solution that is clean, stable, has extremely fast absorption kinetics and low energy consumption, and poses no danger to human health or the environment. The technology allows post-combustion emissions to be captured directly from industrial sources like chimneys. The CO2 is then extracted for purification in order to be reused or converted. It is adaptable to all types of gaseous effluents and helps companies reduce their environmental footprint.

Biological Model

Carbon dioxide is used in the body in different ways. The majority of it (70%) is converted to carbonic acid to be carried to the lungs and breathed out. An enzyme present in red blood cells, carbonic anhydrase, helps convert carbon dioxide to carbonic acid and bicarbonate ions. Carbonic anhydrases are found in mammalian tissues, plants, algae and bacteria. When red blood cells reach the lungs, the same enzyme helps to convert the bicarbonate ions back to carbon dioxide, which we breathe out. Although these reactions can occur even without carbonic anhydrase, its presence can increase the rate of these conversions up to a million fold.

See Related Strategy

Biological Strategy

Carbonic Anhydrases Catalyze Conversion of Carbon Dioxide

Mammals

Carbonic anhydrases in mammals interconvert CO2 and bicarbonate by binding with negatively charged regions of cell compartments.

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