Utilizing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Sunlight in Graphene Quantum Dot-Based Nano-Biohybrid Organisms for Making Carbon-Negative and Carbon-Neutral Products

Increasing emissions of greenhouse gases compounded with legacy emissions in the earth's atmosphere poses an existential threat to human survival. One potential solution is creating carbon-negative and carbon-neutral materials, specifically for commodities used heavily throughout the globe, using a low-cost, scalable, and technologically and economically feasible process that can be deployed without the need for extensive infrastructure or skill requirements. Here, we demonstrate that nickel-functionalized graphene quantum dots (GQDs) can effectively couple to nonphotosynthetic bacteria at a cellular, molecular, and optoelectronic level, creating nanobiohybrid organisms (nanorgs) that enable the utilization of sunlight to convert carbon dioxide, air, and water into high-value-added chemicals such as ammonia (NH₃), ethylene (C₂H₄), isopropanol (IPA), 2,3-butanediol (BDO), C₁₁-C₁₅ methyl ketones (MKs), and degradable bioplastics poly hydroxybutyrate (PHB) with high efficiency and selectivity. We demonstrate a high turnover number (TON) of up to 10⁸ (mol of product per mol of cells), ease of application, facile scalability (demonstrated using a 30 L tank in a lab), and sustainable generation of carbon nanomaterials from recovered bacteria for creating nanorgs without the use of any toxic chemicals or materials. These findings can have important implications for the further development of sustainable processes for making carbon-negative materials using nanorgs.