Project Overview

As the spectre of climate change looms large, a silent yet potent culprit lurks in our midst: methane, a greenhouse gas that traps heat 80 times more efficiently than carbon dioxide. This stealthy fugitive, often escaping from landfills, agriculture, livestock, and energy industries, poses a vexing challenge for our civilization. Yet, within this environmental gloom, a glimmer of hope emerges from the microscopic world. Methylomicrobium album BG8, a particularly promising bacterium renowned for its methane consumption, offer a dual-purpose solution: mitigating methane’s impact while transforming its peril into valuable bioproducts. Our project aims to harness M. Album potential and transform this scientific insight into an industrial reality, unlocking a sustainable pathway to convert this environmental threat into a sustainable asset for our future.

Our main objective is to enhance methane bioconversion using M. album BG8 for sustainable biotechnological applications such as valuable metabolites, biodegradable plastics and/or biofuels. This effort necessitates a deeper understanding of cellular metabolism and improvement in cultivation techniques, alongside exploring co-culture systems. The key objectives are:

• Metabolic Model Refinement: Enhance and validate the Genome-scale Metabolic (GSM) model of M. album BG8 integrating multi-omics data and experimental validation.
• Optimization of Culture Conditions: Developing strategies in bioreactors to improve methane uptake, oxygen availability, growth rates, and metabolite production.
• Co-cultivation Systems: Design and test symbiotic systems with MABG8 and other microorganisms to enhance methane bioconversion efficiency.
• In Silico Evaluations: Use computational models to predict and optimize co-cultivation systems and metabolic outputs.
• Economic and Environmental Impact Assessment: Evaluating the feasibility and sustainability of the methane bioconversion process, contributing to the advancement of synthetic biology and metabolic engineering.