buzbarstow

We're so excited about this because is a key step in building a microbe that can eat electricity directly (without an intermediate like H2), fix CO2 and make high volume bio-products like biofuels, bioplastics. and store electricity.

We know this is in principle a really good idea, and we even came up with a theory that tells us just how efficient this process is. But, it's a real pain in the ass. The bugs that do it naturally have a lot of drawbacks.

So, we'll have to make an engineered bug: maybe by adding electron uptake and CO2 fixation into E. coli. We now know how to put CO2 fixation and fuel synthesis in.

We know the genes that electroactive bugs use for getting electrons out, but these genes alone don't seem to let you get electrons in. Clearly, we're missing something.

So, I set about trying to find the genes. involved by classical genetics, and quickly found out that it completely sucked! So @baym and I came up with Knockout Sudoku to let us build whole genome knockout collections faster and cheaper than ever before ($10k versus $3million).