Advances in Biochemical Engineering-Biotechnology

In vitro hydrogen generation represents a clear opportunity for novel bioreactor and system design. Hydrogen, already a globally important commodity chemical, has the potential to become the dominant transportation fuel of the future. Technologies such as in vitro synthetic pathway biotransformation (SyPaB)—the use of more than 10 purified enzymes to catalyze unnatural catabolic pathways—enable the storage of hydrogen in the form of carbohydrates. Biohydrogen production from local carbohydrate resources offers a solution to the most pressing challenges to vehicular and bioenergy uses: small-size distributed production, minimization of CO2 emissions, and potential low cost, driven by high yield and volumetric productivity. In this study, we introduce a novel bioreactor that provides the oxygen-free gas phase necessary for enzymatic hydrogen generation while regulating temperature and reactor volume. A variety of techniques are currently used for laboratory detection of biohydrogen, but the most information is provided by a continuous low-cost hydrogen sensor. Most such systems currently use electrolysis for calibration; here an alternative method, flow calibration, is introduced. This system is further demonstrated here with the conversion of glucose to hydrogen at a high rate, and the production of hydrogen from glucose 6-phosphate at a greatly increased reaction rate, 157 mmol/L/h at 60 [degrees] C.