Abstract
Succinic acid is an important platform chemical traditionally produced via energy-intensive and environmentally unfriendly processes. Actinobacillus succinogenes offers a sustainable biosynthetic route, yet its productivity is constrained by limited intracellular electron transfer. Here, we develop a photoelectrocatalytic–microbial biohybrid system to overcome these metabolic bottlenecks. Adaptive laboratory evolution using gold nanoparticles establishes an enhanced charge-transfer pathway in Actinobacillus succinogenes, which is subsequently immobilized on a layer-by-layer NiO@PAA@NHS (NiO nanosheets coated with hydrogel of poly acrylic acid (PAA) grafted with N-Hydroxysuccinimide (NHS)) photoelectrode to construct a NiO@PAA@NHS/Au@ Actinobacillus succinogenes biohybrid. Under simulated solar illumination at −0.3 V vs. RHE, the system delivers a photocurrent density of 1.9 mA cm-2, a CO2 conversion efficiency of 67%, and a succinic acid production rate of 1.41 ± 0.04 g L-1 h-1 cm-2. This work demonstrates an effective strategy for coupling solar energy with microbial metabolism for scalable, carbon-neutral chemical production.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 2274041, Z. Z.).
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T. F., X. Z., and Z. Z. designed the experiments. T. F., Y. Z., and X. Z. carried out the experiments. X.Z. conducted the characterizations. All authors wrote the manuscript.
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Feng, T., Zhou, X., Zhang, Y. et al. Photoelectrocatalytic-microbial biohybrid for succinic acid synthesis. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-69962-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-69962-4
