Team:AHUT China/Overview

     Project Overview

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With greenhouse effect becoming a widespread concern in recent years, how to effectively capture CO2 has become a worldwide problem. At present, CO2 capture mostly includes solvent absorption, physical adsorption and membrane separation, etc.The above CO2 capture technologies all have the disadvantages of high cost, low efficiency and poor circulability. These unavoidable disadvantages hinder their application in production and life. Therefore, new technologies are urgently needed, and the technology of carbonic anhydrase (CA) capture makes up for the shortage of other methods.

First, our project successfully expressed wild type carbonic anhydrase in E. coli, however, its industrial application was limited due to poor stability and easy inactivation. Therefore, based on this, molecular simulation technology was used to investigate effect of amino acid residues mutation on the conformation and activity of enzyme, and the mutant carbonic anhydrase with higher thermal stability was obtained.The project includes the following aspects:

      1) molecular simulation;

      2) construction of escherichia coli strains expressing wild type and mutant CA2;

      3) expression and purification of CA2;

      4) practical application of CA2: CO2 capture.

The experimental results showed that the purified mutant carbonic anhydrase exhibited higher stability and activity than wild type carbonic anhydrase, achieving efficient capture of CO2.