Phytonix Corporation Featured in Industrial Biorenewables: A Practical Viewpoint

Phytonix Corporation’s Founder and CEO, Bruce Dannenberg, is the lead author for Chapter 21 “Phytonix: Cyanobacteria for Biobased Production Using CO2”.

The following is an overview of what the chapter entails.

Phytonix’s photobiological process uses carbon dioxide as the sole, nonbiomass feedstock and along with solar energy and water produces the desired biofuel/chemical with only oxygen and residual biomass as by‐products. The Phytonix technology/IP essentially takes the key genetic code/genes for a butanol synthesis pathway from nonphotosynthetic organisms and engineers them into the genome of a photosynthetic cyanobacteria. Thus, this enables butanol to be generated via a photosynthetic/photobiological engine, using carbon dioxide as the sole feedstock/carbon source. The Phytonix photosynthetic process takes place in cyanobacteria as aquatic‐based photosynthetic microorganism. Phytonix’s full production process requires both an organism as well as the equipment to grow the organisms for the direct secretion of liquid n‐butanol into the culture media and a back‐end process for the separation of the butanol from the water‐based culture solution. Butanol is a valuable industrial chemical with a wholesale global market size of ten billion dollars.