【Ten Years of Great Progress in Chemical Technology】From 2017 to 2023, Chinese scientists achieved precise total synthesis of sugar from carbon dioxide
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Ten years of rapid development in chemical technology – praise for China’s prosperity and strength. This is just a starting point; more participation from everyone will make things even more lively. HaiChuan becomes even better with you here; we welcome everyone to participate more actively in the forum discussions. The fragrance of rice flowers in August ----------------------------------------- On August 15, Chinese scientists achieved precise total synthesis of sugar from carbon dioxide. On that day in 2023, they managed to carry out this precise synthesis in the laboratory, taking a crucial step forward in the artificial production of sugar. The efficiency of this sugar synthesis was 0.67 grams per liter per hour, which is more than 10 times higher than previous results. The carbon fixation efficiency for glucose synthesis reaches 59.8 nanomoles of carbon per milligram of catalyst per minute, which represents the highest level of artificial sugar production known to date, both domestically and internationally. After more than two years of research by the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, a precise total synthesis from carbon dioxide to sugars has been successfully achieved. The efficiency and precision of this artificial synthesis of hexoses have reached the highest levels both domestically and internationally. The team mixed raw materials such as high-concentration carbon dioxide in the reaction solution in specific proportions, and under the action of chemical catalysts and enzyme catalysts, four hexoses—glucose, allose, tagatose, and mannose—were obtained. The technology for the precise synthesis of hexoses from carbon dioxide represents a significant scientific innovation. It not only provides us with a new method for sugar production but also offers a new way to utilize carbon dioxide, showing that it is not merely a pollutant but also a potential resource. This opens up great possibilities for using carbon dioxide in efforts to achieve carbon neutrality.
Developing artificial \"carbon dioxide-sugar\" platforms is of great significance for addressing the challenges posed by land shortages and climate change to the supply of dietary sugar. However, upgrading carbon dioxide into complex polyoxygenated carbohydrates presents several major challenges, including achieving enantioselectivity and thermodynamically driven transformations, as well as expanding the product portfolio while reducing energy consumption. On August 16, 2023, Ma Yanhe and Sun Yuanxia from the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (with Yang Jiangang as the first author) published an research paper titled “De novo artificial synthesis of hexoses from carbon dioxide” online in Science Bulletin. This study proposes a multifunctional chemical enzyme roadmap that relies on aldol condensation, enantiomer/isomerization, and asymmetric assembly of CO2 and H2 to form sugars through dephosphorylation reactions, achieving perfect stereoselectivity. This study developed the pathway with the lowest ATP consumption and the shortest route for bottom-up biosynthesis of the basic precursor fructose-6-phosphate, which is valuable for synthesizing a variety of sugars and derivatives. Enzyme catalysts related to engineering bottlenecks facilitate the synthesis of several thermodynamically driven, energy-intensive and functional hexoses such as glucose and allose, achieving higher titers (63 mmol L-1) and carbon dioxide product conversion rates (25 mmol L-1 h-1) compared to established in vitro carbon dioxide fixation pathways. Compared to the traditional \"carbon dioxide-biological resources-sugar\" process, this chemo-biological platform exhibits a higher carbon conversion rate and can be easily extended to the precise synthesis of other higher-order sugars from carbon dioxide.
Upgrading inorganic carbon dioxide into fuels, bulk and fine chemicals is a promising approach to addressing the climate crisis and global resource shortages, as well as achieving global carbon neutrality. Carbohydrates are the most abundant class of biomolecules on Earth; they serve as carriers for energy storage and supply in the human body, are key bioactive substances for human health, and also constitute the main carbon source for industrial biomanufacturing. Currently, the main method for producing carbohydrates is the extraction and conversion of plant biomass. However, this traditional “CO2-biological resources-sugar” process is limited by the energy conversion efficiency of photosynthesis. It is worth noting that it faces supply risks due to land degradation and scarcity, ecosystem degradation, and natural disasters caused by extreme weather and global warming. Solving these problems requires shifting from the current sugar production process to a model that relies on independent biological resources. Artificially synthesizing carbohydrates from carbon dioxide is a promising method that can reduce the environmental impact significantly, alleviate water and food shortages in developing countries, and even mitigate climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions. Carbohydrates usually contain numerous asymmetric carbon centers and hydroxyl groups. Chirally structured sugars possess various known physiological functions, such as low calorie content, prebiotic effects, anti-tumor properties, and anti-inflammatory effects. Furthermore, structurally diverse carbohydrates combined with lipids and proteins help to produce functionally diverse compounds for use in the food and pharmaceutical industries. Recently, researchers published a abiotic roadmap for synthesizing several C6 and C5 sugars from carbon dioxide. However, this process seems to lose control over the chiral centers formed, resulting in mixed products. A complex separation process is also required to obtain stereospecific sugars. Although the chemical enzymatic method is used to convert CO2 into L-erythrose, this approach is limited to the synthesis of a single product. The synthesis of glucose using genetically engineered cellular microorganisms has also been proposed, with CO2 or CH3COOH generated electrochemically serving as carbon sources. However, due to the complex metabolic regulation required for cellular metabolism and sugar synthesis, the CO2-to-sugar conversion rate is low. Previously, the author proposed a convincing chemo-biochemical chimeric approach for synthesizing starch from carbon dioxide. Overall, converting carbon dioxide into three-dimensional and structurally diverse sugars still faces several challenges, including establishing an enantioselective center during the conversion process, achieving thermodynamically driven conversions to obtain high CO2 conversion rates, reducing energy consumption and shortening reaction steps, as well as providing a general method to expand the product portfolio.
This study developed an artificial CO2 to sugar pathway (ACSP) to facilitate the enantioselective conversion of carbon atoms from CO2 into specific sugar stereoisomers. The roadmap for ACSP can be divided into four steps: (i) thermochemical reduction of CO2 to single-carbon methanol without chiral control ； (ii) Serial enzymatic aldol condensation of C1 units to establish a specific stereoscopic configuration in phosphorylated sugars, such as glucose-6-phosphate (F6P) and (3S,4R) ； (iii) Enzymatic epimerization, which converts the chiral centers of phosphorylated sugar precursors into a defined enantiomer, such as 6-isopentulose phosphate (A6P) with (3R,4R) configuration ； (vi) Finally, the resulting intermediate “sugar-phosphate” is dephosphorylated to a stereosugar. The irreversible dephosphorylation step can thermodynamically drive the entire reaction toward the final product.
Thank you for sharing. This is a prerequisite for achieving interstellar travel: artificial food:lol:lol:lol:lol
It collapsed this time! ! ! ! Why do fires in desulfurization towers keep occurring? https://bbs.hcbbs.com/thread-4801693-1-1.html (Source: Haichuan Chemical Industry Forum)