Patrik R. Jones(2015)The prediction of the world’s future energy consumption and global climate change makes it desirable toidentify new technologies to replace or augment fossil fuels by environmentally sustainable alternatives.One appealing sustainable energy concept is harvesting solar energy via photosynthesis coupled to conversionof CO2 into chemical feedstock and fuel. In this work, the production of ethylene, the most widelyused petrochemical produced exclusively from fossil fuels, in the model cyanobacteriumsynechocystis sp.
PCC 6803 is studied. A novel instrumentation setup for quantitative monitoring of ethylene productionusing a combination of flat-panel photobioreactor coupled to a membrane-inlet mass spectrometer isintroduced. Carbon partitioning is estimated using a quantitative model of cyanobacterialmetabolism.The results show that ethylene is produced under a wide range of light intensities with an optimum atmodest irradiances. The results allow production conditions to be optimized in a highly controlled setup