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New discovery reveals how diatoms capture CO2 so effectively
- debacle 2y ago“We have now discovered that diatom pyrenoids are encased in a lattice-like protein shell,” says Dr. Manon Demulder, author on both studies. “The PyShell not only gives the pyrenoid its shape, but it helps create a high CO2 concentration in this compartment. This enables Rubisco to efficiently fix CO2 from the ocean and convert it into nutrients.”
- incompatible 2y ago"The discovery of the PyShell could also open promising avenues for biotechnological research aimed at combatting climate change ..." I wonder. Given that the oceans are already full of these diatoms, and the numbers must be gigantic, would humans be able to do anything in the same order of magnitude?
- sfink 2y ago> "...would humans be able to do anything in the same order of magnitude?" Good question. Answering questions is called 'research'. ;-) I'm skeptical for the same reasons as you, too. Let's see... the ocean covers 361km^2. If we could engineer a material with "cells" that were 1000x as effective at carbon capture as diatoms, and the manufactured material was 1000x more densely packed together than diatoms are on the ocean surface, then you'd need 361 square kilometers of the magic material. Which is not out of the realm of possibility, though I have no idea what the density of diatoms is and I have a sneaking suspicion that we'd be looking at more of the 3x-4x range of efficiency improvement. And of course, you need to turn the CO2 into something and deposit it somewhere, and maybe move it around lot. Which would use energy that would produce more CO2, offsetting the gains. Oh, and manufacture the stuff. I'm thinking releasing less of the stuff and stopping forest destruction might be much more effective for a long time here...
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- magicalhippo 2y ago> the ocean covers 361km^2 That should of course be 361 million km^2.
- canadianfella 2y ago[dead]
- ordu 2y agoHmm... If we are removing CO2 at that rate from some place, then the concentration of CO2 in local atmosphere will drop. It will create a gradient so CO2 will start moving toward us, but what the maximum rate of CO2 diffusion? Wouldn't it impair our ability to miniaturize the ocean filled with diatoms as a CO2 absorber? Though probably one can try to create an artificial wind, blowing CO2-free air away so CO2 could move quickly into the freed space.
- delecti 2y agoThere are a lot of prevailing winds around the world. You'd have to go out of your way to find somewhere still enough that local concentration could drop, rather than just creating a very slight CO2 "shadow" downwind.
- innagadadavida 2y agoI’m skeptical that the entities that created this problem - first world countries, industries, politicians all supported by scientific advances can/will solve the problem they created. The industry will look for a profit motive to solve this. The scientists will look for a publication and fame motive. The politicians will try to grab more power. The poor animals and other third world country people who had nothing to do with this will bear the brunt. Only time will tell.
- tantalor 2y agoEngineer a more efficient diatom. Release it into the wild. What could go wrong.
- lainga 2y agoI guess there would be a silicate famine in the seas, that seems to be the limiting factor for diatom presence overall among plankton [] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatom#/media/File:Diatoms_Egge_and_Aksnes_1992_plot.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatom#/media/File:Diatoms_Egg...
- aeternum 2y agoPerhaps silicate is already the limiting factor and thus we simply need to add silicate to the sea in ratio with the amount of carbon we want to capture. Similar has been tested with iron + algae and seems to work well.
- ThrowAaaaway 2y agoSahara is full of silicate. Just make it green.
- Reason077 2y agoWe'd need to be careful not to "overshoot". If the ocean were somehow made into an even more efficient carbon sink, and human CO2 emissions decline significantly in the coming decades, atmospheric CO2 might eventually find a new equilibrium below pre-industrial levels!
- bamboozled 2y agoThink about how much plastic we produced ? When we want to do something at scale we can.
- asdfman123 2y agoWhen individuals want products we're capable of incredible things
- bamboozled 2y agoAs it climate change gets worse, we will want more carbon munching things.
- whaaaaat 2y agoYou have made a subtle misalignment of figures here. Yes, these existing diatoms fix 20% of the Earth's CO2 and are present throughout the entire ocean. However, we don't need to compete with that volume. We don't have to do the same order of magnitude to meaningfully impact the carbon cycle. The Earth's carbon cycle manages about 750 gigatons of CO2/year and humans are emitting ~30 excess gigatons a year on top. The diatoms in the ocean are happily out there processing 150 gigatons of CO2/year, but what we need to engineer is only 30 gigatons (to completely eradicate human emissions). If we engineered diatoms to fix, say, 0.3 gigatons/year, we'd eradicate a whole integer percent of our emissions. Heck, if we got it in the 0.03 gigatons (30 megatons/year), we've probably built something scalable and created a useful entry in our portfolio to capture carbon, sinking about 0.1% of our carbon/year. So, don't despair, we don't have to compete with the ocean! We only need to compete with ourselves! Or maybe do despair? Because we have to compete with ourselves... fundamentally, climate change isn't a technology problem, it's a political problem.
- arj 2y agoI was looking into the numbers and what I could find was that is more like 350 than 750. Source: https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-much-carbon-dioxide-does-earth-naturally-absorb https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-much-carbon-dioxide-does.... Still interesting fact not often cited.
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- adornKey 2y agoWhen looking into the physics of infrared-absorption of CO2, I found papers about that quite interesting. Maybe climate change is not a political problem and not a technology problem - maybe it's a mental issue. Around my place people burned witches for 400 years - to fight lightning strikes. Removing gigatons of CO2 is maybe on the same level - only more stupid - and bad for plants. Arguments against witch burning didn't have much data to process. For CO2 there's quite some number crunching out there available... Emotions, despair, anger, ... these are a lot of emotional arguments in the media out there. People should be more cool and only care about the physic and mathematics... And actually read some papers - not this emotional science fluff from the media.
- phs318u 2y agoAm I the only one that saw this and thought, "What's a python shell got to do with it?" https://github.com/JoelGMSec/PyShell https://github.com/JoelGMSec/PyShell
- zigzag312 2y agoPython seems to be embedded everywhere nowadays :D
- tzot 2y agoNo, you're not; however, since there weren't any comments here condemning PyShell's (lack of) speed and stating the absolute need for rewrite in another language[1], it was easy to deduce that Python-the-language really wasn't mentioned in the article. [1] with the obvious advantage of improving performance by 2 orders of magnitude thus solving Earth's carbon cycle issues
- Qwertious 2y agoExtracting CO2 from the air likely requires some energy, and seafloor organisms are almost certainly energy-constrained. We could beat the seafloor simply by providing more energy, if we get within the ballpark of their efficiency. We have plenty of deserts and solar panels.
- marcosdumay 2y ago> if we get within the ballpark of their efficiency In all likelihood, we can get ~10x better efficiency without trying very hard. Living beings don't focus much on growing. They are usually less than 1% efficient on that, with more complex life being on the order of 0.1% efficient.
- photochemsyn 2y agoThat's a standard line included in almost all photosynthesis research these days because of the global concern about fossil-fueled global warming, as a justification for continuance of one's research group funding, even if the relationship is rather minor. The key point of this paper with respect to synthetic industrial photosynthesis: > "Reaction-diffusion modeling of C. reinhardtii suggests that all pyrenoid-based CCMs require the following essential features: (1) aggregation of most of the chloroplast’s Rubisco enzymes, (2) a local source of high CO2 concentration at the center of this Rubisco aggregate, and (3) a diffusion barrier at the aggregate border to prevent CO2 leakage. Our data indicate that the PyShell contributes to the first two essential pyrenoid features (Figure 5A), and we wonder whether the PyShell may directly perform the third (Figure 5B)." A big difference between oceanic diatoms and land plants is that the former's carbon source is bicarbonate, and diatoms convert bicarbonate (HCO3-) to CO2 which is utilized by Rubisco to fix CO2 onto a five carbon sugar which then splits into two 3-carbon species that are fed into carbon metabolism to generate lipids, amino acids, carbohydrates, etc. Increasing CO2 concentration around Rubisco makes the process more efficient (as this keeps out the O2, and avoids futile cycles where the O2 gets added to the target sugar). Some land plants (grasses, cacti) use alternative concentration systems not involving bicarbonate (bundle sheath and CAM). The real takeaway for industrial-scale synthetic photosynthesis efforts is that it's always more efficient to preconcentrate CO2 into a 100% CO2 stream before feeding it into a reaction process with suitable robust catalysts in which O2 is removed and H2 is added to generate methanol or methane (somewhat analogous to ammonia synthesis) which (if you want to do real long-term storage) can be converted to materials like carbon fiber or diamond.
- rysertio 2y ago> would humans be able to do anything in the same order of magnitude? We can definitely try to increase wheat production by trying to make a GMO. This could be ground breaking for food production.