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Producing goods, such as foods and fuels, with minimal environmental impacts is urgently needed. Although advances in bioproduction are promising, there is often a noticeable gap in our understanding of whether and where new processes can compete with existing methods on an economic and environmental basis. Transparent lower bound calculations from basic principles highlight potential benefits of producing foods, but not fuels, from electro-microbial production of biomass.
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Data availability
The data used here are summarized in Supplementary Table 2 and can be found in the GitLab repository provided with this manuscript (https://gitlab.com/milo-lab-public/microbial-production-tea.git), together with details of data processing.
Code availability
The code used for the analysis has been deposited into GitLab (https://gitlab.com/milo-lab-public/microbial-production-tea.git).
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Lior Greenspoon, Gidon Eshel, Tamar Makov, Silvio Matassa, Charlie Cotton, Jan Lukas Krüsemann, Niklas Stolz, Yuval Rosenberg, William Newell, Milena Ivanisevic and the many other people we spoke with for their invaluable insights and support on this manuscript. This research was supported by the Tom and Mary Beck Center for Renewable Energy as part of the Institute for Environmental Sustainability (IES) at the Weizmann Institute of Science. R.M. holds the Charles and Louise Gartner Professorial Chair.
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
R.B.-N., E.N. and R.M are inventors on patent applications related to microbial production. D.L. is the co-founder of Cx Bio. The other authors declare no competing interests.
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Lovat, S.J., Ben-Nissan, R., Milshtein, E. et al. Electro-microbial production techno-economic viability and environmental implications.
Nat Biotechnol (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-025-02632-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-025-02632-w
