In the future, bacteria could harness solar energy to provide power for automobiles if an ASU project recently granted $5.2 million by the U.S. Department of Energy succeeds.

A program in the energy department chose only 37 of 3,500 initial applicants to receive grants.

ASU professor Willem Vermaas said he and about 25 other researchers, including some at Diversified Energy and North Carolina State University, are looking at how bacteria can use photosynthesis to create fatty acids that can be modified into biofuel for cars.

The researchers are working with cyanobacteria, a strain of bacteria that uses photosynthesis to produce energy, he said.

“The idea is, in the photosynthesis process, you take solar energy and carbon dioxide, and in normal conditions you make sugars out of it,” Vermaas said.

But instead of using plants to produce sugars through photosynthesis, the project is using cyanobacteria to produce fatty acids.

“Thinking of the bacteria as a biocatalyst, we take water, solar energy and carbon dioxide, and convert it into fatty acids [in the bacteria],” he said. “[The fatty acids] get secreted out, so you don’t need to break the cells open. You can directly take the secreted fatty acids and harvest them.”

The fatty acids secreted by the cyanobacteria would then be processed until they are compounds that cars can run on, Vermaas said.

“If you […] have the fatty acids secreted out of the cell, you can get a high-energy compound which you can then refine into gasoline,” Vermaas said. “Essentially, what you do is take what nature can make, and technologically you process that into something that the automobile knows how to use.”

Daniel Brune, an ASU research scientist in the department of chemistry and biochemistry, is also working on the project.

Brune said he is analyzing the molecules and fatty acids produced by the cyanobacteria.

The concept for using algae to produce biofuels has been around for a long time, he said.

“[But] applying that to cyanobacteria is a little bit newer,” he said. “In some ways cyanobacteria are an ideal organism for this kind of work, because they’re much easier to modify genetically than algae.”

ASU student Raul Gonzalez, a doctoral student in plant biology, is part of the team that’s working on the genetic engineering of the cyanobacteria.

“My involvement is over-expressing proteins that will lead to higher levels of [fatty acids] in the cell,” Gonzalez said.

His academic focus is on plants, but he said the mechanism of photosynthesis is basically the same in bacteria and in plants.

Brune said down the road, engineers will work on how to get the process to work on a large scale.

“It’s going to take some engineering to scale it up,” he said. “What’s important for us is […] developing the strains of cyanobacteria that will be most effective for use on a larger scale.”

Reach the reporter at kkfrost@asu.edu.