Cyanobacteria and electrodes will be forced to evolve together, with the best-performing partnerships selected and bred like prize-winning livestock. Current biohybrid systems—living microbes wired to synthetic materials—are slow and unreliable because researchers cannot easily find which pairings work best. Hidden antagonistic interactions between the biological and material components often sabotage performance. This project aims to replace slow trial-and-error screening with a systematic method called directed co-evolution, where both the microbe and the electrode are iteratively optimised as a single unit. The goal is to identify synergistic partnerships that produce high, stable photocurrents—targeting 2.4 mA/cm², more than 50 times above typical systems. If successful, this work could transform how green energy biohybrids are designed, making them robust and scalable enough for real-world electricity generation. It would also open a new field—directed co-evolution of hybrid systems—that could be applied to other biohybrids and composite functional materials. The research is primarily fundamental science, establishing principles for engineering synergistic bio-material interactions rather than delivering a commercial device. Similar fundamental work on directed evolution of enzymes, for example, later enabled industrial biocatalysis and new drug manufacturing.
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Biological-material hybrid systems are increasingly important in medicine, biotechnology and energy. In particular, microbial biohybrids offer unique advantages for sustainable energy conversion (e.g. scalability and product versatility), but their under-performances curtail their application and impact. State-of-the-art approaches to biohybrid research are slow and confined, with many hidden antagonistic interactions at the bio-material interface to overcome. Here, I aim to create a ground-breaking approach that directly targets the creation, identification, and characterisation of synergistic microbial-material interactions to enable a step-change in generating green energy biohybrids that are high-performing, robust and scalable. Towards this, I will i) develop new methodologies to generate large targeted libraries of key biohybrid components (the electrode, cells and charge carriers); ii) pioneer the powerful concept of directed co-evolution for bio-material engineering. Unlike classical directed evolution where only biological elements are optimised, I will iteratively select for high performing bio-material partnerships under stringent criteria. When these outcomes are compared against those from conventional screening, the identification of synergistic, antagonist or purely independent bio-material interactions will be possible. I will then iii) characterise these partnerships to fill large knowledge gaps within the field to understand how synergism can be designed, instead of found. I will employ cyanobacterial hybrids for solar-electricity generation as model systems, targeting final stable photocurrents of near the top theoretical value 2.4 mA/cm2 (>50-fold above typical systems). This work sets the stage for the transformation of other biohybrids and composite functional materials, and the opening up of a new field: the directed co-evolution of hybrid systems.
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