Scientists achieve carbon dioxide reduction to synthesize glucose and fatty acids

On April 28, Xia Chuan's research group from the School of Materials and Energy, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, in cooperation with Yu Tao's research group from the Institute of Synthetic Biology, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Zeng Jie's research group from the University of Science and Technology of China, published a paper entitled "Nature Catalysis".

At present, problems such as energy crisis and environmental pollution are intensifying, and the use of electricity generated from sustainable energy sources to help green chemical synthesis has gained more and more attention

In order to circumvent the product limitations of carbon dioxide electroreduction, it is possible to couple the carbon dioxide electroreduction process with biological processes, and use the electrocatalytic products as electron carriers for subsequent fermentation by microorganisms to synthesize chemical products with long carbon chains for production and life

The direct electrocatalytic conversion of carbon dioxide to acetic acid has many problems, such as slow reaction rate, low product selectivity and alkali solution absorption

Precise control of C1 _molecules to realize CC coupling to synthesize specific C2 _compounds is the difficulty of current electrocatalytic synthesis

Subsequently, the researchers fed the electrosynthetic high-purity acetic acid solution to Saccharomyces cerevisiae, in order to further synthesize food molecules such as glucose through the yeast's metabolic engineering

The researchers used electrocatalytic synthesis of acetic acid and acetate as the only carbon sources, and fed the method of feeding in batches to synthesize glucose using Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

The research work is supported by the National Key R&D Program and the National Natural Science Foundation of China

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