Thylakoid-Inspired Microreactors Continuously Synthesize CO2 into Glucose Precursor at 15.8 nmol min-1

Abstract

Abstract Excessive CO2 and food shortage are two grand challenges of human society. Directly converting CO2 into food materials could simultaneously alleviate both, like what green crops do in nature. Nevertheless, natural photosynthesis has a limited energy efficiency due to low activity and specificity of key enzyme D-ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (RuBisCO). To enhance the efficiency, many prior studies focused on engineering the enzymes, but we chose to learn from nature to design more efficient reactors. This work is original in mimicking the stacked structure of thylakoids in chloroplasts to immobilize RuBisCO in a microreactor using the layer-by-layer strategy, obtaining the continuous conversion of CO2 into glucose precursor at 1.9 nmol min-1 with enhanced activity (1.5 times), stability (~8 times) and reusability (96% after 10 reuses) relative to the free RuBisCO. We further scaled out the reactors to explore the potential of mass production that would benefit both food supply and carbon neutralization.