Recipient organisationKing's College LondonSource-published name: King's College London
Funding£672K
PeriodMar 2025 — Mar 2028
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
Chemists are engineering enzymes to grab carbon dioxide out of the air and stitch it directly into stubborn benzene rings—a chemical trick no natural enzyme can pull off. Most industrial chemicals, from paracetamol to pesticides, are built from aromatic compounds like benzene. Making them today typically requires petroleum feedstocks and harsh conditions. This project tackles a fundamental gap: there is no green, enzyme-driven method to fix CO₂ onto unactivated aromatic rings. If the team succeeds in engineering a benzoic acid decarboxylase to run the reaction in reverse, they will have created a biocatalyst that turns waste CO₂ into valuable chemical building blocks. The potential impact is broad but indirect. A working enzyme system would let manufacturers produce pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, and specialty chemicals from CO₂ instead of crude oil. That could shrink the chemical industry’s carbon footprint and reduce dependence on fossil feedstocks. The work is fundamental enzyme engineering—no product will reach a factory floor tomorrow—but it directly addresses the grand challenge of using CO₂ as a chemical feedstock rather than a waste gas.
View original technical description
The use of simple and renewable starting materials to construct complex and useful organic molecules is an important goal in sustainable chemistry. The selective functionalisation and valourisation of aromatic compounds through CO2 fixation is an immensely important reaction that allows complex organic compounds to be synthesised from renewable and cheaply available CO2. The organic molecules produced from these reactions can serve as intermediates or active constituents to manufacture pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, cosmetics, and specialty and commodity chemicals. However, selective fixation of CO2 to recalcitrant, unactivated aromatic compounds is difficult to achieve, and a green and efficient enzyme-catalysed system to fix CO2 to unactivated organic compounds like benzene is unprecedented. This project therefore aims to identify, engineer, and develop for the first time enzymes capable of catalysing selective fixation of CO2 to these recalcitrant aromatic compounds as a sustainable chemical synthesis method. Efficient methods for CO2 fixation can have profound and potentially transformative applications in the synthesis of a broad range of useful aromatic compounds. Since these aromatic compounds are the most prevalent building blocks of most of the chemicals that our society depends on, e.g. pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals and cosmetics, efficient selective fixation of CO2 to aromatic compounds will have far-reaching impacts across a broad range of industry sectors. On a broader point, these proposed artificial CO2-fixation systems will contribute to sustainable synthesis, reduce overdependence on fossil fuel, and represent an immensely important anthropogenic CO2 recycling strategy to mitigate the climate and health impacts of excess atmospheric CO2. This proposal directly addresses a chemical science and engineering grand challenge - “Utilising carbon dioxide in synthesis and transforming the chemicals industry”.
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