2024 AIChE Annual Meeting

(201j) Opportunities for Electrochemistry in Chemical Conversions and Human Health

Authors

Evan Miu - Presenter, University of Pittsburgh
James R. McKone, University of Pittsburgh
Giannis Mpourmpakis, University of Pittsburgh
Karthish Manthiram, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Electrochemistry is taking a central role in our ongoing pursuit of sustainability. Here, we consider sustainability as a wide-reaching term that encompasses environmentally friendly behaviors, the preservation of knowledge across generations of scientists and engineers, and the continued improvement of the human condition. In the environmental sense, our chemical industry is a significant carbon emitter and energy consumer. For example, hydrogen production via steam methane reforming is responsible for approximately 900 Mt of CO2 emissions per year. Accordingly, the electrification of chemical manufacturing could enable the use of renewable electricity as an energy source and give access to renewable material sources such as seawater. In addition to the environmental side of sustainability, we can also consider the application of electrochemistry for the improvement of human health. In this direction, electrochemical potential gradients could be leveraged in biosensors and to control the behavior of living microorganisms for engineered therapies.

In this talk, I will discuss the electrochemical sensitivity of two distinct, but fundamentally related, applications in sustainability. First, I will consider the design and demonstration of a catalytic scheme for hydrogen activation from water. In this approach, we pair water electrolysis with general hydrogenations by mediated hydrogen transfers. Using a combination of experimental and computational methods, we investigated the fundamental thermodynamic, kinetic, and transport properties governing hydrogen transfers by oxide bronzes. We then applied these understandings and built a reactor scheme that coupled the reduction of protons to the reduction of an organic hydrogen acceptor. Second, I will present ongoing work which investigates the electrochemical control of gene expression. Here, we investigated the fumarate and nitrate reductase regulator (FNR)—a native redox-sensitive regulator in Escherichia coli—as a component of biological circuits. After evaluating the fundamental redox characteristics of FNR, we assembled transcriptional units (TUs) that are electrochemically sensitive: applied potentials could turn gene expression on and off. By integrating multiple TUs, we engineered biological circuits that induce electrochemically-sensitive and electrode-inducible behavior in E. coli. These circuits represent a step towards the electrochemical control of microorganisms. Altogether, these two topics demonstrate the wide applicability of electrochemistry for enabling our continued pursuit of sustainability.