A University of York scientist has received £6 million for a ten-year project investigating one of the planet's most effective carbon-capture systems: microscopic algae.
Professor Luke Mackinder has been awarded a Royal Society Faraday Discovery Fellowship to how algae capture carbon dioxide with remarkable efficiency. Collectively, ocean algae are responsible for around half of global carbon fixation.
The project will combine cell biology, engineering biology and robotics to understand the mechanism in detail and explore whether parts of it can eventually be reconstructed or adapted.
Trees understandably dominate the public image of . Much of the heavy lifting, however, is being done by organisms too small to feature on a climate campaign poster. York's project is going looking inside that microscopic machinery.