PhD student opportunity on project at Radboud University

Rok za prijavu: 31.08.2019

Hydrazine is a valuable commercial product used as blowing agent, antioxidant, rocket fuel and in many more applications. Strikingly, anaerobic ammonium-oxidizing (anammox) bacteria are the only organisms that use the highly reactive hydrazine as a free metabolic intermediate. Anammox bacteria play an important role both in the environment and industry where they recycle reactive nitrogen species that are major pollutants of the environment back to dinitrogen gas. During the anammox process, nitrite is first reduced to nitric oxide which is then combined with ammonium to form hydrazine. Next, hydrazine is oxidized to dinitrogen gas. The unique anammox enzyme responsible for the synthesis of hydrazine is called hydrazine synthase and is a biochemical novelty. The aim of this project is to use the anammox enzyme hydrazine synthase to convert wastewater nitrogen species ammonium and nitrite into commercially-valuable hydrazine via both a metabolic engineering and biochemical approach. In the metabolic engineering project, ammonium and nitrite will be converted to hydrazine by expressing nitrite reductase and hydrazine synthase in the host Wolinella succinogenes. In the biochemical project, the nitrite reductase and hydrazine synthase enzyme will be employed in vitro to produce hydrazine from nitrite and ammonium via three different approaches: on cascade protein-coated electrodes, in polymersomes and in membrane vesicles. In the end, the most feasible approach will be extended to a test case to assess whether hydrazine can be produced from ammonium-containing
wastewater on a larger scale.

Positions available:

• PhD student (4 years): starting date between 1 September 2019 – 1 September 2020
• Postdoc (4 years): starting date between 1 September 2019 – 1 September 2020

For details contact prof. dr. Laura van Niftrik: l.vanniftrik@science.ru.nl