Hydrogen gas has received serious consideration as an alternative to petroleum because it is a clean-burning energy carrier that can be converted to electricity in hydrogen fuel cells and used to power automobiles or any other electricity-driven process. Part of the appeal of hydrogen is that it can be produced from a wide range of resources including natural gas, coal, fossil fuels, biomass and solar energy.

We use systems level approaches to dissect metabolic and regulatory networks necessary for nitrogenase-catalyzed hydrogen production by the photosynthetic bacterium Rhodopseudomonas. Rhodopseudomonas is an ideal platform to develop as a biocatalyst for hydrogen gas production because it is an extremely versatile microbe that produces copious amounts of hydrogen by drawing on abundant natural resources of sunlight and biomass. Hydrogen production requires the appropriate integration of dozens of metabolic reactions carried out in the context of a complex web of molecular interactions within the cell.

We use proteomics, transcriptomics, RNA-seq, computational network analysis and C13 metabolic flux analysis to approach these problems.