Participants
- University of Almería
- Polytechnical University of Cataluña.
Contacts
Funds:
Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness
Current Situation:
In progress
Summary
The Cyan2Bio project aims to develop and demonstrate a sustainable process for the production of bioproducts from cyanobacteria, including biopolymers (PHB), pigments (phycobiliproteins) and biostimulants/biopesticides, and finally biogas. This approach calls for a multidisciplinary research group, which is better suited by combining the expertise of two complementary groups in a coordinated proposal the Environmental Engineering and Microbiology Research Group of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (GEMMA-UPC, Subproject 1) and the Chemical Engineering Department of the Universidad de Almería (DIQUAL, Subproject 2).
Objectives:
Cyan2Bio project aims at producing bioproducts and bioplastic fron cyanobacteria in a sustainable process.
- Exploration: The bioplastics productivity is strain-specific and therefore a wide range of strains should be tested to find out highly productive microorganisms. Selected strains will contain pigments and bioactive molecules that must be considered as potential by-products.
- Testing: The selected strains will be produced at different culture conditions (both at laboratory and large scale) to identify the ones providing biomass richest in target compounds. For the production of biopolymers, the organic substrate added upon starvation under mixotrophic conditions should be an organic waste (e.g. a mixture of organic sugars from the food industry) to increase the circularity of the process, but this rationale can be extended to the utilization of waste streams as nutrients source also in autotrophic production mode.
- Process development: Adequate production and downstream processing of the biomass must be developed and validated, including the monitoring of the biological system and the utilization of cultures composed by several suitable strains that might be more capable of coping with environmental changes due to the waste effluents treated, and also with eventual competition/depredation relationships with microorganisms present in these waste streams. Furthermore, the development of biorefineries allowing to maximize the product yield then producing other by-products such as biostimulants, biofertilizers or pigments together with PHB will enhance the profitability of the process.