What are the short-term and long-term costs of synthetic starch? What are the commercial prospects on earth?

Synthetic starch has only been successful in the laboratory and has not been commercialized, so it is impossible to calculate the short-term and long-term costs. The commercial prospects on earth are as follows:

Food production accounts for approximately 100% of the world's total. 40% of cultivated land produces 25% of greenhouse gases. As one of the most important food ingredients, the sustainable supply of starch is an important challenge facing mankind in the future.

This research result combines chemical and biological methods and uses a series of new technologies such as protein engineering and synthetic biology to directly synthesize starch from carbon dioxide, completely subverting the traditional starch production method.

This research work is a typical "0 to 1" original achievement, which not only has a revolutionary impact on future agricultural production, especially food production, but also has a revolutionary impact on the development of the global biomanufacturing industry. Landmark significance.

Ma Yanhe said that if the process cost of this system is economically feasible compared with agricultural planting in the future and is actually applied, it will be possible to save more than 90% of arable land and freshwater resources and avoid pesticides, chemical fertilizers, etc. Negative impact on the environment and improve human food security.

Technical Path

Using carbon dioxide to artificially synthesize starch, simulating and drawing on natural processes to build a new artificial photosynthetic pathway, scientific researchers thought of the energy conversion method of light energy - electrical energy - chemical energy , first converting light energy into electrical energy through photovoltaic power generation.

Hydrogen is generated through photovoltaic electrohydrolysis, and then the hydrogen is used to reduce carbon dioxide to methanol through catalysis, and the electrical energy is converted into chemical energy stored in methanol. The energy conversion efficiency of this process exceeds 10%, far exceeding that of photosynthesis. energy utilization efficiency.

Methanol stores energy from solar energy, but the life process of methanol synthesizing starch does not exist in nature. Therefore, the researchers used the idea of ??synthetic biology to design an artificial route from methanol to starch, ASAP, which only contains 10 main reactions from massive biochemical reaction data.

In order to turn the design blueprint into reality, the researchers also discovered and transformed 62 biological enzyme catalysts from 31 different species of animals, plants, microorganisms, etc., and finally selected the best from the best, using 10 enzymes to gradually One-carbon methanol is converted into three-carbon dihydroxyacetone, which is further converted into six-carbon glucose phosphate, and finally amylose and amylopectin are synthesized.