Sun yuanxia's team and sun Zhoutong's team from Tianjin Institute of industrial biology, Chinese Academy of sciences have made new progress in the biosynthesis of branched ketose

Dendroketose is one of the rare sugars 4-hydroxymethylfurfural (4-hmf) can be prepared by chemical dehydration 4-hmf is a very important pharmaceutical intermediate Cantharidin can be used as an anti-tumor drug to treat liver cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer, esophageal cancer, colon cancer and other cancers In addition, 4-hmf compounds can be hydrogenated into 2,4-dimethylfuran (2,4-dmf) and c9-c15 branched alkanes for the preparation of liquid fuels The traditional chemical synthesis of branched ketose with strong base as catalyst has great environmental pollution Therefore, it is of great significance to develop a low-cost, environmentally friendly and single product high-efficiency synthesis technology of branched ketose for the biological preparation of high value-added chemicals and energy compounds The research team of functional sugars and natural active substances led by sun yuanxia, researcher of Tianjin Institute of industrial biotechnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, found that an aldolase has the function of catalyzing the aldol condensation between ketone and aldehyde on the basis of studying the carbon carbon connection reaction between ketone and aldehyde The research team cooperated with the research team of enzyme molecular engineering and industrial biocatalysis led by researcher sun Zhoutong of Tianjin Institute of industrial biology to carry out molecular dynamics simulation and Analysis on the new function of the enzyme, and revealed the catalytic mechanism of the enzyme; constructed in vitro multi enzyme cascade catalytic system, and realized the preparation of branched ketose from formaldehyde by using C1 chemical reaction, with the conversion rate of 86% At the same time, Corynebacterium glutamate was used as the starting strain to construct a cell factory, and the yield of branched ketose synthesized by glucose or glycerin reached 36.3 g / L This research promotes the application of cheap resources such as C1, C3 and C6 in the field of green biological manufacturing of fine chemicals and energy compounds Branched ketose biosynthesis (source: Biotechnology for biofuels) supported by the key deployment project of Chinese Academy of Sciences and the 100 person plan project of Chinese Academy of Sciences, the research results have applied for Chinese invention patents, and the related results have been published on biotechnology for biofuels (DOI: 10.1186 / s13068-018-1293-7), Tianjin Institute of industrial biology Assistant researcher Yang Jiangang and associate researcher Zhu Yueming are the co first authors of the paper.