No. It doesn't make sense to put this into E coli. In order to convert CO2 into usable carbon (usually, sugars), you need energy. And where is E coli going to get this energy? Breaking down sugars and burning them to create CO2?
Either by a symbiotic relationship with cyanobacteria or by transferring the genes from cyanobacteria. I mean, we're already talking about combining nine organisms into one, why stop there?
That's semireasonable: you can give e coli glucose made by a cyano (using human glucose transporter). But you're still making glucose and then burning it... Why use a middle man? Why not just transform the cyanobacteria with this system to begin with?
The energy in the system seems to be coming from ATP which is used to move energy around in both animals and plants, so it could presumably be wired to photosynthesis (which I assume is what the researchers had in mind — take the process plants use to store energy by converting water + C02 into sugar and replace it with something more efficient). And that's the limit of my high school organic chemistry.
And e coli can be modified to do photosynthesis too.
