GRANT and AWARDS SERIES (Accelerating CCs Technologies): Tomas Morosinotto, Laura Treu, Stefano Campanaro
Pubblicato il: 30.09.2021 16:12
Title: Harnessing potential of biological CO2 capture for Circular Economy- CooCE
Goal: To demonstrate and validate novel biotechnological processes for sustainable valorisation and long-term storage of CO2-rich emissions
Summary CooCE aims at validating the use of sustainable anaerobic and aerobic biological processes for the conversion of CO2 into clean biofuels allowing flexible on-site hybrid energy storage, and valuable chemical building blocks, namely biosuccinic acid (bioSA) and high-volume added value biopolymers (polyhydroxyalkanoates, PHAs) for the production of bioplastics. Being the project coordinator, Unipd will ensure timely and high-quality implementation of the work packages and provide efficient administration and financial coordination. Moreover, Unipd will be scientifically responsible for developing and optimising the production of PHA from CO2 using real gas streams achieving CO2capture into biopolymer and to demonstrate the technology.
PI and Co-PIs biography
Prof. Tomas Morosinotto is full Professor at Department of Biology. His focus is on the study of photosynthesis in different organisms investigating how evolution shaped the regulation of this metabolic process and by the generation of plants and algae with improved photosynthetic activity and biomass productivity. Work on development of biotechnological applications of algae biomass was awarded in 2012 of an ERC starting Grant and is now continuing also with the support of private companies.
Prof. Stefano Campanaro is Associate Professor at Department of Biology and Director of the Center for Innovative Biotechnologies (CRIBI), University of Padova. He has extensively studied the gene expression of microbial species including yeast, lactic acid bacteria, archaea. He has been involved in the development of software and pipelines for metagenomics and transcriptome analysis.
Dr. Laura Treu is research fellow at Department of Biology. Her research is focused on the use of molecular biology and microbial ecology for bioenergy production and CO2 capture. Her focus is on the metabolic and functional processes influencing the microbial metabolism using metabolic flux balance to identify growth rates and molecules consumption and production.
