"Fermented agriculture" may solve the problem of human food and clothing.

Original title: "Fermented agriculture" or will solve the problem of human food and clothing
On June 3rd, at the "Green Nut Lecture Hall New Problem Salon" held at the Shanghai Museum of Natural History (Shanghai Science and Technology Museum), Yang Huanming, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and chairman of the Huada Genetics Research Institute, said that "fermented agriculture" may solve the problem of human food and clothing in the future.
Yang Huanming said that the so-called "fermentation agriculture", that is, the use of synthetic genomics technology, in the fermentation tank synthesis of rice, wheat, corn and other food and a variety of vegetables, so that agriculture no longer rely on the sky to eat, yeast feeding on the line.
, Science published a paper on the Synthetic Yeast Genome Project on its cover and in a special issue. A number of research institutions in China, the United States, the United Kingdom and other countries participated in the program, with the Chinese team completing two-thirds of the total workload. The Synthetic Yeast Genome Project aims to synthesize all 16 chromosomes of the true nuclear organism, brewing yeast, meaning that the source code for yeast's life can be written entirely by human.
Yang Huanming refers to this wine-making yeast chromosome as "life 3.0" and is the third generation of life that has been artificially designed and synthesized with genomics concepts, strategies and techniques, following natural life (life 1.0) and life (life 2.0) with modern biotechnical transformation. "If the Human Genome Project is a decoding process for the Book of Life, then synthetic genomics is a coding process. It is the highest stage of genomics development to date and will have a disruptive impact on the life sciences and biological industries. Today
scientists in China and the United States have designed and synthesized more advanced single-celled ucleochemical chromosomes. Next, scientific institutions, including Huada Gene, set a higher goal of artificially designing and synthesized multicellular ucleo-biological chromosomes.
will this road of scientific exploration, which is climbing the mountain, bring to mankind? Yang Hunming listed a range of applications for the audience: food and medicine, biomass and bioeneene, intelligent analog cells, biocomputers... He highlights the application of food production: "How will humans feed themselves in the future?" It can be produced by fermentation agriculture", i.e. in the fermentation tanks of factories, nearly 200 crops (including food and vegetables) in the world.
Yang Huanming says this is perfectly feasible in theory, because all "biological products" have specific metabolic pathways and signaling pathways, and if their scientific laws are mastered, the industrial production of crops can be achieved by using microbial and synthetic biology techniques to build metabolic pathways.
fact, some biological products have been industrialized and synthesized. For example, based on the genome sequence of artemisinin grass, scientists constructed a metabolic pathway of artemisinin synthesis in E. coli, and then used yeast as an engineering cell to industrialize the production of artemisinin prebiotic substance, artemisinin acid.
asked whether synthetic genomics would "open Pandora's Box," Mr Yang said the burgeoning discipline would not challenge bioethics norms as long as it was not too radical. (Huang Xin)