Abstract
Food production in green crops is severely limited by low activity and poor specificity of D-ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (RuBisCO) in natural photosynthesis (NPS). This work presents a scientific solution to overcome this problem by immobilizing RuBisCO into a microfluidic reactor, which demonstrates a continuous production of glucose precursor at 13.8 μmol g−1 RuBisCO min−1 from CO2 and ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate. Experiments show that the RuBisCO immobilization significantly enhances enzyme stabilities (7.2 folds in storage stability, 6.7 folds in thermal stability), and also improves the reusability (90.4% activity retained after 5 cycles of reuse and 78.5% after 10 cycles). This work mimics the NPS pathway with scalable microreactors for continuous synthesis of glucose precursor using very small amount of RuBisCO. Although still far from industrial production, this work demonstrates artificial synthesis of basic food materials by replicating the light-independent reactions of NPS, which may hold the key to food crisis relief and future space colonization.
Highlights
Food production in green crops is severely limited by low activity and poor specificity of D-ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (RuBisCO) in natural photosynthesis (NPS)
Glucose is the basic material of food produced by green plants using the natural photosynthesis (NPS)[1]
Scientists have figured out an excellent alternative to NPS, which is called artificial photosynthesis (APS), for the energy-rich chemicals production
Summary
Food production in green crops is severely limited by low activity and poor specificity of D-ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (RuBisCO) in natural photosynthesis (NPS). This work presents a scientific solution to overcome this problem by immobilizing RuBisCO into a microfluidic reactor, which demonstrates a continuous production of glucose precursor at 13.8 μmol g−1 RuBisCO min−1 from CO2 and ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate. Laboratory for Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery, Food Safety and Technology Research Centre, Department of Applied Biology and Chemical Technology, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China. 7 Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China. Glucose is the basic material of food produced by green plants using the natural photosynthesis (NPS)[1]. It mimics the green plants to produce energy-rich materials and fuels but using man-made nanomaterials and engineered photosynthetic reactors. Compared with the NPS, the APS usually presents much higher efficiency (~12%) and simplicity[5]
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