In a new perspective paper published in Joule, we propose electro-agriculture as a new approach for future food production. This new approach combines CO2 electrolysis with biological systems to boost food production efficiency. By utilizing acetate generated from CO2 through renewable electricity, electro-agriculture enables the heterotrophic growth of crops, bypassing the efficiency constraints of photosynthesis. This article is highlighted as the cover story.

Professor Feng Jiao is named on the annual Highly Cited Researchers™ 2024 list from Clarivate, placing him among world’s most influential scholars, based on citations.

Comprising nearly 7,000 researchers from around the world, the list is compiled by the Institute for Scientific Information at Clarivate based on quantitative and qualitative data collected from scholarly publication of papers that ranked in the top 1% by peer citations during the previous decade.

Washington University in St. Louis received the first NSF Engineering Research Center grant in its its history! With a total of $26 million research fund from NSF, CURB will focus on combining electrocatalysis with biological systems to create new routes for sustainable biomanufacturing. Dr. Jiao will serve as the associate director for convergent research.

As one of the four teams competing in the final phase of the NASA Deep Space Food Challenge (Phase 3), NoLux won the runner up and a cash prize of $250,000. The Jiao Lab worked closely with other team members at the University of California Riverside over the two years, successfully turning a concept into a fully working prototype. The prototype has been operated for two months by students from Ohio State University and produced mushrooms from CO2-derived acetate.   

The conversion of CO2 into valuable chemicals is a key strategy for carbon utilization. Although tandem CO2 electrolysis has shown promise, it has been largely confined to watt-scale studies and larger-scale studies are needed to accelerate commercialization. In a recent effort, the Jiao lab demonstrated a tandem CO2 electrolyzer engineered for the production of multicarbon products, acetate and ethylene, at the kilowatt (kW) scale. The results have been published in Nature Chemical Engineering. [link]

Dr. Jiao and his co-workers have been granted a new US patent on the CO2/CO electrolysis technology.