Scientists complete starch synthesis from CO2, revolutionary for agricultural

Can anyone explain how this works?

Even the news article didn't care to explain the process.

Cool though the development in the article is, everything I hear about space colonisation says that to make it viable you need power and physical space on a scale that isn’t significantly harmed by “just” using hydroponics and aeroponics, and the hardest problem in any case is the protein rather than the calories.

(That and Trek replicators being much to fast for any mechanism we currently know about, so think “better bread machines” until someone can demonstrate 3D printing with IDK atomic quantum holography or something).

From the paper in question[1]

"carbon dioxide is reduced to methanol by an inorganic catalyst and then converted by enzymes first to three and six carbon sugar units and then to polymeric starch. This artificial starch anabolic pathway relies on engineered recombinant enzymes from many different source organisms and can be tuned to produce amylose or amylopectin at excellent rates and efficiencies relative to other synthetic carbon fixation systems—and, depending on the metric"

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abh4049

> Preliminary lab tests show that synthetic starch is about 8.5 times more efficient than starch produced by conventional agriculture. Under the condition of sufficient energy supply and current technical parameters, the annual production of starch of 1 cubic meter bioreactor is equivalent to the annual production of starch of 5 mu (0.33 hectare) of corn in China.

Ah of course, leaving aside the small issue of energy use this process does indeed seem very efficient