ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2010
Design and analysis of synthetic carbon fixation pathways.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2010. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 173 papers.
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Who cites it
173 citing papers in PubMed.
- Engineering of fructose-6-phosphate aldolase for one-carbon conversion to mannitol in a designed biotransformation system.Synthetic and systems biotechnology · 2026Article
- Electroenzymatic COAngewandte Chemie (International ed. in English) · 2026Review
- Natural and Synthetic Metabolic Architectures.Chembiochem : a European journal of chemical biology · 2026Article
- Synthetic Biology of Plants and Microbes for Agriculture, Environment, and Future Applications.Chemical reviews · 2026Review
- Computational approaches in chemical space exploration for carbon fixation pathways.NPJ systems biology and applications · 2026Article
- Tree species diversity promotes soil microbial carbon fixation gene abundance via nutrient-mediated interactions in subtropical forests.Frontiers in microbiology · 2026Article
- Not just Rubisco: integrated strategies to overcome the biochemical limitations of CFrontiers in plant science · 2026Review
- Systematic design and evaluation of artificial COSynthetic and systems biotechnology · 2025Article
- Rubisco is slow across the tree of life.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- A blueprint for designing the next-generation of synthetic CNature communications · 2025Review
- Strategies to improve photosynthesis by modifying the RuBisCO system and its limitations.Molecular biology reports · 2025Review
- Automated and Programmable Cell-Free Systems for Scalable Synthetic Biology with a Focus on Biofoundry Integration.Journal of microbiology and biotechnology · 2025Review
- Microbial responses to ocean deoxygenation: Revisiting the impacts on organic carbon cycling.iScience · 2025Review
- Article
- Review
- Discussion of the possibility of increasing the efficiency of photosynthesis using genetic and metabolic engineering methods.Biodesign research · 2025Review
- Article
- Seven critical challenges in synthetic one-carbon assimilation and their potential solutions.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2025Review
- Cell-Free Gene Expression: Methods and Applications.Chemical reviews · 2025Review
- A synthetic methylotroph achieves accelerated cell growth by alleviating transcription-replication conflicts.Nature communications · 2025Article
113 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Carbon fixation is the process by which CO(2) is incorporated into organic compounds. In modern agriculture in which water, light, and nutrients can be abundant, carbon fixation could become a significant growth-limiting factor. Hence, increasing the fixation rate is of major importance in the road toward sustainability in food and energy production. There have been recent attempts to improve the rate and specificity of Rubisco, the carboxylating enzyme operating in the Calvin-Benson cycle; however, they have achieved only limited success. Nature employs several alternative carbon fixation pathways, which prompted us to ask whether more efficient novel synthetic cycles could be devised. Using the entire repertoire of approximately 5,000 metabolic enzymes known to occur in nature, we computationally identified alternative carbon fixation pathways that combine existing metabolic building blocks from various organisms. We compared the natural and synthetic pathways based on physicochemical criteria that include kinetics, energetics, and topology. Our study suggests that some of the proposed synthetic pathways could have significant quantitative advantages over their natural counterparts, such as the overall kinetic rate. One such cycle, which is predicted to be two to three times faster than the Calvin-Benson cycle, employs the most effective carboxylating enzyme, phosphoenolpyruvate carboxylase, using the core of the naturally evolved C4 cycle. Although implementing such alternative cycles presents daunting challenges related to expression levels, activity, stability, localization, and regulation, we believe our findings suggest exciting avenues of exploration in the grand challenge of enhancing food and renewable fuel production via metabolic engineering and synthetic biology.
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