The Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has made a major breakthrough in the synthetic starch, and for the first time realized the synthesis process from carbon dioxide to starch in the laboratory. The research results were published online in the world's top journal Science.
Objectively speaking, this research is a big breakthrough at the Nobel Prize level. I believe that seeing this, many people will wonder: what is so great about this?
We can briefly enumerate what human life would be like if this technology were to be applied on a large scale.
Large amounts of arable land are no longer required
Reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and solve the problem of global warming
Turn solar energy into liquefied energy
No more potatoes on Mars (Note: In the American blockbuster "The Martian", astronauts grow potatoes on Mars)
So what's going on? This time we will talk about this matter.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" What is the use of starch > data-track="9"? </h1>
As the saying goes, "People don't live to eat, but to eat to live", and if people want to live, they must consume enough food. And if you classify food according to its ingredients, there are probably only a few categories:
Carbohydrates (sugars)
protein
fat
Inorganic salt
trace element
water
Among them, carbohydrates, proteins and fats can provide energy to the human body. The foods we eat every day actually have a nutrition facts list, and these ingredients are written on it.
Carbohydrates are one of the most important sources of energy for human beings, and carbohydrates are composed of three elements of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, which are the most existing organic compounds in nature, because the ratio of hydrogen and oxygen is two to one, and water, it is called carbohydrates.
There are also many kinds of carbohydrates, and we can also classify them into polysaccharides, and monosaccharides. Common polysaccharides are starch and cellulose, and the most typical monosaccharides are glucose and fructose.
When we eat grain, it contains starch, which enters the human body, it will be decomposed into a simple sugar "glucose", glucose can produce ATP in cells, ATP hydrolysis can release a lot of energy for the human body to use.
Therefore, starch is actually the most needed energy source for human beings, and the essence of human cultivation of crops is to obtain starch. In the sunlight, the chloroplasts of plants can synthesize carbon dioxide and water into starch, the whole process is extremely complex, various regulation and reactions have about 60 steps, very slow, for the utilization and conversion rate is extremely low, only about 2%. This makes us need a lot of arable land to grow crops.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="22" > synthetic starch</h1>
The experimental method of synthesizing starch is a different approach, requiring only 11 steps. The first is to combine carbon dioxide and hydrogen into methanol under an inorganic catalyst, which also uses the technology of solar energy decomposition of water to produce hydrogen, which is also inspired by the use of solar energy by photosynthesis. Then, methanol is converted into a three-carbon compound, and the three-carbon compound is collectively called a six-carbon compound, and so on, like a building block, and finally polymerized into starch.
Compared with plant synthetic starch, the operation is simple, the process is few, the rate is fast, the conversion rate and utilization rate have been greatly improved, and the utilization rate of light energy in the previous natural synthesis of starch is less than 2%, and this time the utilization rate is more than 10%. In other words, researchers can use solar energy, electrical energy plus carbon dioxide and water to prepare their own starch.
The great significance of this technology is not only that there is an additional starch production route, but more importantly, it is to prepare for our migration to outer space.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="26" > food source for space-dwellers</h1>
In the American blockbuster "The Martian", American astronaut Mark Watney was left on Mars, his companions have left, and the food can only last for about a month, but he grows potatoes in space with his status as a botanist, relying on potatoes he survived and successfully waited for the rescue of the earth.
Through this film, we can see that in the American imagination, the food source for human colonization of Mars is the supply of the Earth, and the cultivation of crops on the surface of Mars.
However, China's science and technology has broken the imagination of the United States, after the success of artificial synthetic starch technology, the future human colonization of Mars, there is no need to plant crops on the surface of Mars, but can directly use carbon dioxide to make starch on the surface of Mars, so that the starch cycle is shorter, and the conversion rate is higher, and more starch can be obtained at the least cost.
Some people may say: Since starch can be synthesized artificially, can it be used to cultivate land in the future?
In fact, it is not possible to obtain starch by laboratory synthesis alone, and it is necessary to continue farming. In the future, after large-scale production can be achieved, it may be possible to reduce the area under agricultural cultivation.
But in addition to starch, human beings also need vitamins, and we mainly get vitamins from fruits and vegetables, plus we eat fruits and vegetables mainly like their taste, so before we can not synthesize fruits and vegetables, we still have to continue to farm.
Of course, in addition to being used as space food, synthetic starch has many benefits: saving land; achieving carbon neutrality as soon as possible; farmers do not have to work, and even eliminate hunger in the world, from these points of view, the technology of artificial starch synthesized by Chinese scientists is very important, and once mass-produced, it will benefit the entire earth.
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