The Research Institute of "making starch from Air" welcomes another breakthrough! Accurate Total Synthesis from carbon dioxide to Sugar in China
Thanks to CTOnews.com netizen Real_ for the clue delivery! CTOnews.com, August 17, 2021, Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences realized artificial total synthesis from carbon dioxide to starch for the first time in the laboratory, causing an international sensation.
On August 16, Tianjin Industrial Biotechnology Research Institute made another major breakthrough, and the research institute made new progress in artificially converting carbon dioxide to hexose.
According to reports, sugar is not only an important substance in human life activities and daily life, but also a key raw material for today's industrial biological manufacturing. So far, the acquisition of sugar mainly depends on plant biomass resources. However, this traditional "carbon dioxide-biomass resources-sugar" processing process is limited by the energy conversion efficiency of plant photosynthesis; most importantly, due to land degradation and shortage, ecosystem degradation, extreme weather and natural disasters caused by global warming, the mode of production dependent on sugar biomass resources is faced with problems such as security and risk of raw material supply. In order to solve this series of problems, it is necessary to change this traditional sugar-making process to the non-sugar biomass resource manufacturing mode.
Centering on the above problems and challenges, the research team of functional sugars and natural active substances of Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, based on carbon condensation, isomerization, dephosphorization and other enzymatic reactions, in cooperation with Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, established a chemical-enzyme cascade conversion of carbon dioxide to hexose artificial synthesis pathway, through enzyme molecular modification technology to improve the activity of natural enzymes, substrate specificity and other catalytic performance Three functional modules of C-6 were constructed. Through modular assembly, hexose with different structures and functions were synthesized accurately in vitro, and the conversion rate was higher than that of traditional plant photosynthesis. At the same time, the product concentration and carbon-sugar conversion rate were higher than the reported artificial sugar production methods, such as chemical synthesis, electrochemical-yeast fermentation coupling and so on.
The sugar synthetic system constructed by this study can be further coupled with other enzymatic biochemical reactions to prepare sugar molecules and their derivatives with various structures. Therefore, the research results have established a method for the synthesis of hexose from carbon-carbon dioxide, methanol, formaldehyde and other carbon compounds, achieving high conversion efficiency and precise and controllable configuration of hexose artificial synthesis, which will provide a possibility for the conversion from non-biomass raw materials to a variety of artificial sugar products.
▲ artificial hexose synthesis route design, this research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Tianjin synthetic Biotechnology Innovation Initiative, Chinese Academy of Sciences Youth Innovation Promotion Association and other projects. The relevant research results were recently published in the journal Science Bulletin. Associate researcher Yang Jiangang, Dr. Song Wan and researcher Cai Tao of Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biology are the co-first authors of the paper, and Sun Yuanxia and Ma Yanhe are the co-correspondent authors of the paper.
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