TIANJIN, China, 17th August, 2023 (WAM) — Chinese scientists have developed an artificial method of synthesising hexoses from carbon dioxide (CO2) in a laboratory environment — a key step in the global development of synthetic sugar.
The novel methodology presented in this study was conducted jointly by the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology and the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, both affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The findings were published on the Science Bulletin website on Wednesday, as reported by state news agency Xinhua.
The team said that developing artificial "CO2-sugar" platforms is meaningful to addressing challenges that land scarcity and climate change pose to the supply of dietary sugar.
"We present a versatile chemoenzymatic roadmap based on aldol condensation, iso/epimerization, and dephosphorylation reactions for asymmetric CO2 and H2 assembly into sugars with perfect stereocontrol," the team said in the paper.
This chemical-biological platform has demonstrated a greater carbon conversion yield than the conventional "CO2-bioresource-sugar" process, and could easily be extended to precisely synthesise other high-order sugars from CO2, it said.
Two years ago, the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology developed an artificial method of synthesising starch from CO2.