CyanoCapture Raises £2.1M to Remove Carbon With Genetically Engineered Cyanobacteria

CyanoCapture, a UK biotechnology company, has raised £2.1 million to develop its biological carbon capture platform based on genetically modified cyanobacteria. The company is engineering these photosynthetic microorganisms — which use sunlight to fix CO₂ from the atmosphere and convert it into organic matter — to capture carbon dioxide at scale and generate useful biological products including biomass and biological oils as a co-product of the capture process.

The case for biological carbon capture methods rests on energy economics. Engineered direct air capture systems — machines that chemically extract CO₂ from ambient air — currently require substantial energy input to drive the capture and compression processes, making them expensive to operate and meaning that the energy source powering the plant is critical to the net carbon balance. Biological systems, by contrast, are powered by sunlight: photosynthetic organisms have been pulling carbon out of the atmosphere for billions of years, and their fundamental energy efficiency advantage over mechanical systems is substantial. The challenge is scaling biological capture to the rates and volumes needed to make a meaningful contribution to carbon removal, and ensuring that the carbon fixed by the organisms is stored durably rather than simply returning to the atmosphere when the organisms decompose.

CyanoCapture's approach uses synthetic biology tools to engineer cyanobacteria with enhanced carbon fixation rates and modified metabolic pathways that direct captured carbon towards high-value outputs — biological oils that can be used as sustainable feedstocks for aviation fuel, chemicals, or other applications — reducing the overall cost of carbon removal by generating a sellable co-product alongside the environmental service. Cyanobacteria have natural advantages for this application: they are among the fastest-growing photosynthetic organisms, can be cultivated in non-agricultural settings including open ponds or closed bioreactors, and are well-characterised organisms with an increasingly sophisticated toolkit of genetic modifications available.

The funding will support laboratory development of the engineered strains, early-stage process development for scale-up, and the scientific and regulatory work required to advance the technology towards larger demonstration projects. CyanoCapture is operating at the intersection of the carbon removal and synthetic biology markets, both of which have attracted significant investor interest as the scale of the carbon removal challenge has become better understood.

Sources

• CyanoCapture — company website