Cyanobacteria can fix up to 25% of carbon on Earth through their exceptional carbon fixation capabilities and play a significant role in the global carbon cycle. The central CO2-fixing machinery in cyanobacteria is the carboxysome, a protein-based microcompartment of 80-300 nm in diameter. The carboxysome encapsulates the key CO2-fixing enzyme, Rubisco, using a proteinaceous polyhedral shell, which is composed of hexamers that tilt the shell facets and pentamers that occupy the polyhedral vertices. The shell plays a critical role in concentrating CO2 around Rubisco to enhance carboxylation. The genes encoding carboxysome proteins are located predominantly in the carboxysome operons in the genome. These natural features of carboxysomes have inspired the design and reprogramming of carboxysomes using synthetic biology as novel nanobioreactors/nanocarriers in carbon-negative biomanufacturing.

The strain that CyanoCapture is working with, has shown one of the highest number of carboxysomes in the cell documented.

CyanoCapture and the Liu lab (Liverpool) have joined forces to work on a novel idea to build an enabler technology that harnesses engineered carboxysomes into larger isolated structures that can compartmentalise industrial enzymes and translocated recombinant proteins of interest for biotechnological applications.