PHB Producing Cyanobacteria Found in the Neighborhood—Their Isolation, Purification and Performance Testing

Abstract

Cyanobacteria are a large group of prokaryotic microalgae that are able to grow photo-autotrophically by utilizing sunlight and by assimilating carbon dioxide to build new biomass. One of the most interesting among many cyanobacteria cell components is the storage biopolymer polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB), a member of the group of polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA). Cyanobacteria occur in almost all habitats, ranging from freshwater to saltwater, freely drifting or adhered to solid surfaces or growing in the porewater of soil, they appear in meltwater of glaciers as well as in hot springs and can handle even high salinities and nutrient imbalances. The broad range of habitat conditions makes them interesting for biotechnological production in facilities located in such climate zones with the expectation of using the best adapted organisms in low-tech bioreactors instead of using “universal” strains, which require high technical effort to adapt the production conditions to the organism‘s need. These were the prerequisites for why and how we searched for locally adapted cyanobacteria in different habitats. Our manuscript provides insight to the sites we sampled, how we isolated and enriched, identified (morphology, 16S rDNA), tested (growth, PHB accumulation) and purified (physical and biochemical purification methods) promising PHB-producing cyanobacteria that can be used as robust production strains. Finally, we provide a guideline about how we managed to find potential production strains and prepared others for basic metabolism studies.