Background
The rapidly increasing need for energy (by the year 2050 the global annual energy consumption will be twofold the current consumption) and the adverse effects of the use of fossil fuels on the level of atmospheric carbondioxide is an incentive to the scientific community to search for alternative methods for fuel production. Biotechnology-based processes rank amongst the most promissing approaches. Klaas Hellingwerf, Professor of General Microbiology and specialized in photosynthesis and Joost Teixeira de Mattos, Professor of Microbial Physiology and working in the field of bacterial fermentations are research leaders at the Department of Molecular Microbial Physiology at the University of Amsterdam.
They have combined their expertises and developed a concept which employs the photosynthetic properties of cyanobacteria to capture sun light and reduce carbon dioxide merged with the properties of fermentative organisms to produce all kinds of valuable compounds, ranging from amino acids to organic acids and alcohols.
Central to the point of view of their socalled Photanol® concept is the fact that solar energy is plentiful (the amount that reaches the Earth's surface every hour is sufficient to meet the world's annual energy needs) but that current technologies fail to capture all that energy efficiently and store it in a useful form. If we would have Nature's photosynthetic specialists help us converting the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide to precursor molecules that Nature's fermentation specialists subsequently ferment to e.g.ethanol or butanol, we have a process that contributes to lowering carbon dioxide production and exploits only the excess solar energy that is available to make valuable biofuels.

Essentially, the Photanol® concept is to design a cyanobacterium that contains the genetic information that will endow it with a predefined fermentative capacity. Expression of a fermentation pathway should be under control of environmental conditions that are defined and set by the process design. This can be achieved by a proper genetic construction of the cyanobacterium. In short, the concept makes use of a cyanobacterial species that contains a genetic cassette that, when switch on by an environmental trigger, directs the metabolic carbon flow in the cell from carbon dioxide to the desired product. These products are subsequently excreted by the organism and can be separated from the solution by state-of-the-art technologies. Because the process follows the shortest possible biochemical pathway from substrate to end product, it is manyfold more efficient in terms of production yield per surface than 1th and 2nd generation biofuel technologies.

For further details on the process, please visit the site of the Department of Molecular Microbial Physiology at the University of Amsterdam site