Artificial starch from CO2. Ground breaking new tech could reduce land and water use by 90%.

if you've been keeping an eye on the variables affecting our climate in recent years which i suspect you have been if you're watching this channel then you'll no doubt be aware that one of the biggest challenges we face on the planet is the amount of land that we humans have already commandeered and converted to grow food fifty percent of all habitable land on earth is now dedicated to agriculture of that fifty percent more than three quarters is used either as grazing land for livestock or to grow animal feed like corn and soy and i'm sure we've all seen the news stories about the rapidly diminishing rainforests that are being cleared to provide more and more of this agricultural land every day so as our global population pushes on towards the 10 billion mark by mid-century and as climate change causes arctic blasts unprecedented flooding historic heat waves and disastrous droughts that are making farming increasingly unviable in many parts of the world i think it's safe to say we've got a major problem to solve as a species in the coming decades one of the less talked about products of agriculture the one that's seeing rapid market growth around the world is starch it's obviously used extensively in the food processing industry mainly to make sugars and sweeteners but also increasingly in industries like pharmaceuticals textiles and paper and packaging we're on target to produce 160 million tons of the stuff by the middle of this decade and right now it's all derived from natural photosynthesis of plants like corn in an industrial process requiring huge amounts of cultivated land and fresh water so finding a way to make this essential ingredient in a laboratory would be something of a holy grail that could significantly reduce our land use and remove the risk of adverse weather conditions affecting crop yields well that's precisely what a scientific research team in china claimed to have achieved in a recent paper published in the journal science but can they match the efficiency of nature's process and is there apparently disruptive breakthrough really scalable to real world production levels hello and welcome to just ever think the process of photosynthesis is one of those miracles of nature without which life on earth simply would not have got going in the first place plants take up water through their root systems and use sunlight to break it down into oxygen and hydrogen and then in a process called the calvin cycle carbon dioxide from the air gets added into the mix to produce glucose which is a simple sugar that forms the building blocks of starches and cellulose the plants can then use the starches as a form of stored energy and the cellulose to build the plant structure it's an astonishing natural phenomenon but i've only really given you the very basic overview there the full process to get to the production of starch involves about 60 different complex steps and it's not actually all that efficient i mean don't get me wrong it was absolutely fine for what evolution created it for and it served pretty well as the basis for all life on earth for millions of years so you know i'm not knocking it but when it comes to the ridiculous levels of over consumption that we humans are now inflicting on our planetary systems waiting for photosynthesis of starch to just sort of happen in crops planted in millions upon millions of hectares of open fields that used to be rain forests is bonkers the world's largest producer of starch is currently the united states its 33 million metric tons represented 27 percent of the global market in 2021 much of that demand is for corn starch primarily driven by the growing use of gluten-free ingredients in the food and beverage industry due to the rising incidence in the states of gluten intolerance and celiac disease but just like in most other industrial sectors china is rapidly catching up by 2026 it's predicted to be producing more than 30 million tons a year and demand for starch is rising all over the world not least as an adhesive substance for the packaging industry as online shopping becomes our main way of consuming goods so this latest study could be good news the team working at the chinese academy of sciences has developed what they call an artificial starch anabolic pathway or asap which they reckon is the world's first method for the artificial synthesis of starch from co2 it was by no means a straightforward process though unlike the natural pathways in nature that have evolved over hundreds of millions of years of selection the computer design pathways in this research kept coming across unpredictable and undesired interactions that were inhibiting the process so the team had to break the overall system down into more manageable modules so that they could attempt various substitutions to narrow down the culprits that were reducing the overall speed of the reaction what they came up with is a process involving some truly fantastic scientific words all of which are probably quite well known to you if you happen to be a biochemist so if you are a biochemist then i'm afraid you'll just have to forgive my layman's enthusiasm for learning new and excitingly long words the first one is chemoenzymatic which is how the research team refer to their overall process of converting carbon dioxide into starch their chemoenzymatic system has only 11 steps or core reactions instead of the 60 or so found in nature first of all carbon dioxide is reacted with hydrogen to produce methanol which is then dehydrogenated with the help of alcohol oxidase or aox to produce formaldehyde then an enzyme called formalase or fls is added to the mix which with the help of a catalyst called dihydroxyacetone kinase or dak and a dollop of polyphosphate kinase or ppk turns the formaldehyde into something called dihydroxyacetone phosphate or dhp it's fun this isn't it and we're only at step 5 of 11. another enzyme called triosiphosphate isomerase helps convert the dhp into glyceraldehyde or gap which then goes through a whole series of chemoenzymatic reactions which to save all of our sanities i won't describe in my new detail here although if you do want the minute detail i will as always leave a link to the full research paper in the description section below this video anyway suffice to say that by step 11 we end up with one of the most complicated and confusing illustrations i've ever had to animate for one of my videos and starch to get to this apparently world changing breakthrough the team went through a few iterations which they called asap 1.0 2.0 3.0 and 3.1 to cut to the chase pathway 3.0 produced a starch molecule called amylose which is one of the constituents of natural starch in fact it makes up about 20 to 30 percent with the rest being made up of something called amylopectin which the team managed to produce in asap 3.1 by introducing a starch branching enzyme or sbe from a bacterium called vibrio funificus the starch synthesis rate of the asap 3.0 chemoenzymatic pathway was 22 nanomoles per minute per milligram of total catalyst and proteins which again unless you're a chemistry major probably doesn't mean very much to you at all what does mean something though is the fact that those numbers equate to a production rate of starch that's eight and a half times the rate of starch synthesis via that natural calvin cycle in maize so i'm glad we got all that cleared up then now there are many of you out there who quite rightly ask what the energy conversion efficiencies are of all these new breakthroughs and discoveries that i make videos about each week and of course that's a very good question well the research team from the chinese academy of sciences have tried to put some quantities to that as well according to the paper the theoretical efficiency of the hydrogen to methanol stage is 85 and the combined efficiency of all the other stages to get from methanol to starch is 61 percent assuming you can get about 20 efficiency from solar panels and you derive your hydrogen from solar-powered electrolysis with an 85 efficiency rate then the maximum theoretical solar to starch efficiency of the asap method will be about 9 but you do also need some heat and pressure in the chemical steps so the team calculated an efficiency factor for that of 68 giving a final overall efficiency of seven percent now that sounds pretty terrible doesn't it but it turns out it's actually pretty comparable to the theoretical photosynthetic efficiency of solar energy to biomass and about three and a half times the efficiency of solar to starch conversion that plants manage in a natural environment in a recent interview with new atlas the team's lead author kai tao said according to the current technical parameters the annual production of starch in a one cubic meter bioreactor theoretically equates with the starch annual yield from growing one third of a hectare of maize without considering the energy input the team reckons that if the costs can be reduced to levels comparable with agricultural planting practices for starch harvesting then synthetic starch production could potentially save more than 90 percent of the cultivated land and water currently used in the industry which would surely be a very good thing indeed if you've got views on this one or if you've got experience in the field and you can share some helpful nuggets of insight then why not jump down to the comment section below and leave your thoughts there that's it for this week though as always a big thank you to the folks at patreon who keep these videos completely independent and ad free and i must give a quick shout out to the folks who've joined since last time with pledges of ten dollars or more a month they are lowek abbett robert anderson roy heath chris and danielle legrand peter hodgson walt denis cardozo michael merimer greg cardenas peter litton anderson sue cubberly and ben dudley and of course a big thank you to everyone else who's joined since last time too if you feel you can support the channel's independence in that way and you'd like the chance to exchange ideas with like-minded folks and help choose future video topics in monthly content polls then you can join the team at patreon by visiting patreon.com forward slash just have a think and you can always support us for free by subscribing and hitting that like button and notification bell you do all that very easily just by clicking down there or on that icon there as always thanks very much for watching have a great week and remember to just have a think see you next week you

Channel: Just Have a Think

Views: 142,805

Keywords:

Id: e2SsheLN1t8

Length: 11min 32sec (692 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 12 2021