Scientists have found a new ally in the fight against CO2 emissions: “Chonkus”

Earth's most extreme nooks and crannies hide diverse galaxies full of microorganisms – some of which could help rid the atmosphere of the carbon dioxide humanity has pumped into it.

One microorganism in particular has caught the attention of scientists. UTEX 3222, also called “Chonkus” because of the way it devours carbon dioxide, is a previously unknown cyanobacterium found in volcanic marine vents. A recent paper published in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology concluded that it has exceptional potential for atmospheric purification – even among its well-studied peers. If scientists could figure out how to genetically engineer it, the natural quirks of this single-celled organism could become a low-waste carbon capture system.

Cyanobacteria like Chonkus, sometimes misnomered as blue-green algae, are aquatic organisms that absorb light and carbon dioxide and convert them into food by photosynthesizing like plants. But hidden within their single-celled bodies are chambers that allow them to concentrate and absorb more CO2 than their distant, leafy relatives. When found in exotic environments, they can develop unique characteristics not often found in nature. For microorganism researchers, whose fields have long focused on a handful of easy-to-handle organisms such as yeast and E. coli, the untapped biodiversity opens up new possibilities.

“There is more and more excitement about isolating new organisms,” said Braden Tierney, a microbiologist and one of the lead authors of the paper that identified Chonkus. On a September 2022 expedition, Tierney and researchers from the University of Palermo in Italy dove into the waters around Vulcano, an island off the coast of Sicily where shallow-water volcanic vents provide an unusual habitat — lit by sunlight yet rich in plumes of carbon dioxide . The site produced a veritable soup of microbial life, including chonkus.

After Tierney retrieved bottles of seawater, Max Schubert, the other lead author of the cyanobacteria paper and lead project scientist at the scientific nonprofit Align to Innovate, went to work identifying the various organisms they contained. Schubert said cyanobacteria like Chonkus grow slowly and are sparsely distributed in the open ocean. “But if we wanted to use them to remove carbon dioxide, we would have to grow them much faster,” he said, “and at concentrations not found in the open ocean.”

Back in the lab, Chonkus did just that: it grew faster and thicker than other previously discovered cyanobacteria candidates for carbon capture systems. “When you grow a bacterial culture, it looks like broth and the bacteria are very diluted in the culture,” Schubert said, “but we found that Chonkus would settle in this substance, which is much denser, like a green peanut butter .” ”

Chonkus' peanut butter consistency is important to the strain's potential in green biotechnology. Typically, biotech industries that use cyanobacteria and algae must separate them from the water in which they grow. Because Chonkus does this naturally using gravity, Schubert says this could make the process more efficient. But there are many other mysteries to solve before a discovery like Chonkus can be used for carbon capture.

CyanoCapture, a UK-based cyanobacteria carbon capture startup, has developed a low-cost biomass-based carbon dioxide capture method that houses algae and cyanobacteria in transparent tubes where they can grow and filter CO2. Although Chonkus shows unique potential, David Kim, the company's CEO and founder, said that biotech companies need to have more control over its properties, such as carbon storage, to exploit it successfully, and to do that they need to find a way to use its DNA to break up.

“Often in nature we find that a microbe can do something cool, but it doesn't do it as well as we need to,” said Henry Lee, CEO of Cultivarium, a nonprofit biotech start-up in Watertown. Massachusetts, which specializes in the genetic engineering of microbes. Cultivarium has been working with CyanoCapture to help them research Chonkus, but has yet to figure out how to tinker with its DNA and improve its carbon binding properties. “Everyone wants to juice it up and tweak it,” he said.

Since the Vulcano expedition where Tierney tracked down Chonkus, the nonprofit Two Frontiers Project, which he founded to explore more extreme environments around the world, has also discovered hot springs in Colorado, volcanic vents in the Tyrrhenian Sea near Italy and coral reefs sampled the Red Sea. Maybe researchers out there will find a chunkier choncus that can store even more carbon, microbes that can help coral regrow, or other organisms that can ease the pain of a rapidly warming world. “There is no doubt that we will continue to find really interesting biology in these sources,” Tierney said. “I cannot emphasize enough that this was only the first expedition.”

Kim found that of all the microbes out there, less than 0.01 percent have been studied. “They do not represent the true arsenal of microbes with which we could potentially collaborate to achieve humanity’s goals.”