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Scientists complete starch synthesis from CO2, revolutionary for agricultural

globaltimes.cn

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Re: Scientists complete starch synthesis from CO2, revolutionary for agricultural

#11

Post by baybal2 »

ben_w wrote: post #6
mrfusion wrote: post #3

Sounds like huge news for space exploration and colonization. First step in building a Star Trek replicator?

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 “bette…

Protein from hydrocarbons was available since at least seventies. Google paprin, and gaprin. Paprin is yeast eating paraffin, gaprin is methane oxidising bacteria.

I myself ate a porridge of paprin once when the food situation in Russia was bad enough.

Re: Scientists complete starch synthesis from CO2, revolutionary for agricultural

#12

Post by phtrivier »

rozab wrote: post #10

> 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…

I suppose the upside could be that you _could_ imagine (if, of course, the whole thing was efficient enough) a process where you use low-carbon electricity (nuclear or poorly-timed renewables) to power CO2 capture from air, and then turn the CO2 into starch, and then maybe turn the starch into something edible ? (I don't have enough grain of salts to take my own words here...)

It's a huge stretch to image that being competitive with conventional agriculture. Still, just imagining a situation where we could use electricity to turn CO2 into food...

Re: Scientists complete starch synthesis from CO2, revolutionary for agricultural

#13

Post by ChuckMcM »

mrfusion wrote: post #2

Can anyone explain how this works?

See jarenmf's comment. Basically the CO2 is catalyzed into Methane using an 'inorganic catalyst', there is this paper[1] which uses a ruthenium catalyst at 400 degrees C to do it.

Then the methane is consumed by some genetically modified bacteria (probably e.coli) first to convert it to an intermediate product, and then with a second organism to convert it into starch.

In the article they talk about genetically modified enzymes and I've actually jumped ahead to the using genetically modified bacteria here[2]. I think that is a safe assumption as a number of bio-reactors do exactly this.

What is somewhat interesting to me is that livestock generates a lot of methane, if you could harvest it and convert it back into starch to feed the livestock you could increase the efficiency of raising livestock farming.

[1] https://phys.org/news/2020-02-method-carbon-dioxide-methane-...

[2] The article hasn't appeared in sci-hub yet :-)

Re: Scientists complete starch synthesis from CO2, revolutionary for agricultural

#14

Post by [deleted] »

phtrivier wrote: post #12
rozab wrote: post #10

> 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…

I suppose the upside could be that you _could_ imagine (if, of course, the whole thing was efficient enough) a process where you use low-carbon electricity (nuclear or poorly-timed renewables) to power CO2 capture from air, and then turn the CO2 into starch, and then maybe turn the starch into something edible ? (I don't have enough grain of salts to take my own words here...) It's a huge stretch to image that being…

[deleted]

Re: Scientists complete starch synthesis from CO2, revolutionary for agricultural

#15

Post by pacman2 »

jarenmf wrote: post #8

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 s…

Good idea for the wrong product. Does not make sense to make food out of it, at least not on earth.

"carbon dioxide is reduced to methanol by an inorganic catalyst"

The methanol can be used as fuel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_economy

Re: Scientists complete starch synthesis from CO2, revolutionary for agricultural

#17

Post by entee »

jarenmf wrote: post #8

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 s…

The catalyst is the part I'm most curious about. Carbon capture is a hard problem at scale. Once you have methanol, I'm not terribly surprised that you can convert it to other things enzymatically. Hard to evaluate without full text of paper though.

Re: Scientists complete starch synthesis from CO2, revolutionary for agricultural

#18

Post by sk2020 »

phtrivier wrote: post #12
rozab wrote: post #10

> 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…

I suppose the upside could be that you _could_ imagine (if, of course, the whole thing was efficient enough) a process where you use low-carbon electricity (nuclear or poorly-timed renewables) to power CO2 capture from air, and then turn the CO2 into starch, and then maybe turn the starch into something edible ? (I don't have enough grain of salts to take my own words here...) It's a huge stretch to image that being…

There may be places where you would want access to starches, agriculture is not feasible, transportation costs are prohibitive, but you also have abundant power. I’m struggling to think of a place that meets all those criteria.

Re: Scientists complete starch synthesis from CO2, revolutionary for agricultural

#19

Post by entee »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #13
mrfusion wrote: post #2

Can anyone explain how this works?

See jarenmf's comment. Basically the CO2 is catalyzed into Methane using an 'inorganic catalyst', there is this paper[1] which uses a ruthenium catalyst at 400 degrees C to do it. Then the methane is consumed by some genetically modified bacteria (probably e.coli) first to convert it to an intermediate product, and then with a second organism to convert it into starch. In the article they talk about genetically modif…

Most of the methane comes from cattle belching, so it's basically impossible to harvest at scale. The lagoons of manure also do, and that can be harvested though it's hard.

https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/33/which-is-a-bigger-methane-so...

Re: Scientists complete starch synthesis from CO2, revolutionary for agricultural

#20

Post by gavinray »

sk2020 wrote: post #18
phtrivier wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose the upside could be that you _could_ imagine (if, of course, the whole thing was efficient enough) a process where you use low-carbon electricity (nuclear or poorly-timed renewables) to power CO2 capture from air, and then turn the CO2 into starch, and then maybe turn the starch into something edible ? (I don't have enough grain of salts to take my own words here...) It's a huge stretch to image that being…

There may be places where you would want access to starches, agriculture is not feasible, transportation costs are prohibitive, but you also have abundant power. I’m struggling to think of a place that meets all those criteria.

On a spacecraft with solar panels?

The desert maybe?

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