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China food security
ChinaScience

Chinese scientists have found new way to make starch in a lab. Could it save on water and land?

  • Paper in Science magazine details system to reduce carbon dioxide to methanol which is converted by enzymes to carbon sugar units, then to starch
  • But the laboratory method is a long way from being sustainable, energy efficient, economically viable or a replacement for traditional agriculture

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Scientist Cai Tao shows a sample of synthesised starch at a lab earlier this month. Photo: Xinhua
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Researchers at an institute under the Chinese Academy of Sciences have developed a way to artificially create starch from carbon dioxide much quicker than plants can naturally, potentially cutting the amount of farmland needed for starch crops.

But more research is needed for the process to be industrialised and other scientists said the energy source would determine if the energy-intensive method was sustainable.

The researchers at the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology said they had developed a process that would make starch in laboratories 8.5 times faster than the starch synthesis cycle in corn, resulting in a product they said was the same as natural starch.

“We only need a few hours in the lab to complete the process which takes a few months by plants,” lead author Cai Tao, a research associate with the institute in Tianjin, told state broadcaster CCTV.

“The annual production of starch in a 1 cubic metre (35 cubic foot) bioreactor theoretically equates to the annual yield from growing one-third of a hectare (35,500 square feet) of maize without considering the energy input.”

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