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Record W4413636948 · doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1013379

Mixotrophy for carbon-conserving waste upcycling

2025· article· en· W4413636948 on OpenAlexafffund
Christian Euler

Bibliographic record

VenuePLoS Computational Biology · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEnergy
TopicCO2 Reduction Techniques and Catalysts
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Waterloo
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaUniversity of Waterloo
KeywordsCarbon fibersMixotrophWaste managementComputer scienceBiologyEngineering

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Modern chemical manufacturing, on which human quality of life depends, is unsustainable; alternative production routes must be developed. Electrochemical and biological processes offer promise for upgrading waste streams, including recalcitrant carbon dioxide and plastic-derived wastes. However, the inherent heterogeneity and high energy requirements of upcycling the chemical endpoints of the "take-make-waste" economy remain challenging. Cupriavidus necator is an emergent catalyst for complex feedstock valorization because of its extreme metabolic flexibility, which allows it to utilize a wide array of substrates, and its ability to use carbon dioxide via the Calvin-Benson-Bassham cycle. C. necator natively oxidizes hydrogen to power carbon utilization, but its flexibility offers an as-yet unexplored opportunity to couple waste stream oxidation with carbon dioxide utilization instead, potentially enabling carbon conservative waste upcycling. Here, we uncover the constraints on carbon conservative chemical transformation using C. necator as a model. We systematically examine the carbon yield and thermodynamic feasibility of mixotrophic scenarios combining waste-derived carbon sources with hydrogen oxidation to power carbon reassimilation. Then, we evaluate carbon-carbon mixotrophic scenarios, with one carbon source providing electrons in place of hydrogen oxidation. We show that both hydrogen and ethylene glycol are feasible electron sources to drive carbon-neutral or carbon-negative mixotrophic upgrading of waste streams such as acetate or butyrate. In contrast, we find that carbon conservation is likely infeasible for most other waste-derived carbon sources. This work provides a roadmap to establishing novel C. necator strains capable of carbon efficient waste upcycling.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.179
Threshold uncertainty score0.388

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.018
GPT teacher head0.279
Teacher spread0.261 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations2
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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