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Cyanobacterial H2 production — a comparative analysis

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Abstract

Several unicellular and filamentous, nitrogen-fixing and non-nitrogen-fixing cyanobacterial strains have been investigated on the molecular and the physiological level in order to find the most efficient organisms for photobiological hydrogen production. These strains were screened for the presence or absence of hup and hox genes, and it was shown that they have different sets of genes involved in H2 evolution. The uptake hydrogenase was identified in all N2-fixing cyanobacteria, and some of these strains also contained the bidirectional hydrogenase, whereas the non-nitrogen fixing strains only possessed the bidirectional enzyme. In N2-fixing strains, hydrogen was mainly produced by the nitrogenase as a by-product during the reduction of atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia. Therefore, hydrogen production was investigated both under non-nitrogen-fixing conditions and under nitrogen limitation. It was shown that the hydrogen uptake activity is linked to the nitrogenase activity, whereas the hydrogen evolution activity of the bidirectional hydrogenase is not dependent or even related to diazotrophic growth conditions. With regard to large-scale hydrogen evolution by N2-fixing cyanobacteria, hydrogen uptake-deficient mutants have to be used because of their inability to re-oxidize the hydrogen produced by the nitrogenase. On the other hand, fermentative H2 production by the bidirectional hydrogenase should also be taken into account in further investigations of biological hydrogen production.

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Fig. 1a–k
Fig. 2a, b
Fig. 3

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Abbreviations

Chl:

chlorophyll

MV:

methyl viologen

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Acknowledgements

The work of the Portuguese team was financially supported by FCT and FSE (III Quadro Comunitário de Apoio), and PRAXIS/P/BIA/13238/98. Financial support from the European Science Foundation Program on Cyanobacterial Nitrogen Fixation (CYANOFIX), COST Action 841, the Swedish Energy Agency, and the Swedish Research Council is gratefully acknowledged. The cyanobacterial strains Gloeothece sp. ATCC 27152 and Lyngbya majuscula CCAP 1446/4 were kindly provided by Professors J.R. Gallon and P.C. Wright, respectively. We thank Dr. Helena Carvalho for assistance with the optical microscopy work, and Fredrik Oxelfelt for the Gloeothece DNA-extraction method.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Molecular and Cell Biology, University of Porto, Rua do Campo Alegre 823, 4150-180, Porto, Portugal

    Elsa Leitão, Paulo Oliveira & Paula Tamagnini

  2. Biochemie der Pflanzen, AG Photobiotechnologie, Ruhr-Universität-Bochum, 44780, Bochum, Germany

    Kathrin Schütz & Thomas Happe

  3. Department of Physiological Botany, EBC, Uppsala University, Villavägen 6, 752 36, Uppsala, Sweden

    Olga Troshina & Peter Lindblad

  4. Institute of Basic Biological Problems, Russian Academy of Sciences, 142 290, Pushchino, Moscow region, Russia

    Olga Troshina

  5. Department of Botany, Faculty of Sciences, University of Porto, Rua do Campo Alegre 1191, 4150-181, Porto, Portugal

    Paulo Oliveira & Paula Tamagnini

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  1. Kathrin Schütz
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  2. Thomas Happe
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  3. Olga Troshina
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  5. Elsa Leitão
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Correspondence to Paula Tamagnini.

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Schütz, K., Happe, T., Troshina, O. et al. Cyanobacterial H2 production — a comparative analysis. Planta 218, 350–359 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00425-003-1113-5

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