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Comment by codecamper | Hacker News Reader

Have you heard about George Church's idea?

He says it's possible to modify the dna of cyanobacteria so that they become immune to their natural predator: the cyanophage.

Apparently cyanobacteria consume an incredible amount of CO2 every year, but then right away release it again after the cyanophage kills them.

Seems like a potentially workable idea, but I have not heard him give the details anywhere.

He is at MIT & so are some of you guys... go talk with him! Maybe it could be used inside your towers as a way to more efficiently capture the co2?

Thanks for doing what you all are doing btw. We desperately need a solution.

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Cyanobacteria cultivation is an old idea[1] and is limited by more than just phage. I did the math on carbon removal in a controlled environment somewhere like Nevada, and it could contribute to climate solutions. If Church is suggesting we release GMO cyanobacteria into the ocean, that is a whole separate category of idea, somewhere between Guam's Brown Tree Snakes and Ice Nine. If it succeeds, we will introduce a new kind of ocean trash - an organism with no predators. But phage is likely just mutate anyway. IDK how close you've been to Church or his orbit, but most of his ideas are mostly clickbait.

In the case this one isn't, the release of genetic modifications into the wild will be a debt our children have to pay, the way we are paying for our ancestors use of CO2.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2018.0000...

Sorry for the big delay in getting back to you!

I'll look more into this - this isn't a solution I'm familiar with. Thanks for sharing, and thanks for your kind words and dedication to solving this problem.

His idea seems like a rough sketch. I don't know how deep he has thought about it. But he mentioned it in at least a few talks.

Would be awesome if you all just looked him up & went to talk with him.

He represents the "what bio can do" part of the equation. And bio does quite a lot already.

What do you anticipate will happen if we make cyanobacteria "immune to their natural predator", leading to their unchecked proliferation...?

Hilarious that nobody upvoted my post. I've been looking into the CO2 problem for more than 10 years & this seems like one of the most promising ideas... because it sounds possible to pull off.

Yes, I have the same question for Dr. Church. How does he plan to control their population? Maybe something like this:

https://news.mit.edu/2015/kill-switches-shut-down-engineered...

YSK those 'kill switches' just have to be abandoned by their host to stop working. They create a huge evolutionary pressure for this.

Are there examples of this happening?

Something else will eat them. Even a human could.

Doesn't matter what eats them, after digestion, the CO2 is back in the atmosphere.

If you actually want to do this, you can't just leave them in the wild, you have to breed them in massive quantity and bury them. Same as growing a tree and burying it.

George Church figured they'd just collect and then sink. not much life down there and once it is deep enough, it might be deep enough to perma-sequester.

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