Researchers succeeded in biomanufacturing using chemically synthesized sugar for the first time in the world

Biomanufacturing using chemically synthesized sugars enables sustainable supply of sugar without competing with food

21-Feb-2024 - Biomanufacturing using biomass sugars such as corn obtained from agriculture is attracting attention as an environmentally friendly technology. However, the supply of such conventional biomass sugars is limited in relation to the huge demand for the production of fuels and chemical products, ...

Blue-green algae sugar instead of glyphosate

Cooperation project develops environmentally friendly glyphosate alternative

06-Dec-2023 - Glyphosate reliably destroys unwanted plants, is used worldwide - and has been highly controversial for years due to its negative effects on the environment and health. For a long time, there was talk of banning the herbicide in Germany and possibly even throughout the EU. Fortunately, a better ...

Next-generation flow battery design sets records

Sugar additive plays a surprise role, boosting flow battery capacity and longevity for this grid energy resilience design

13-Jul-2023 - A common food and medicine additive has shown it can boost the capacity and longevity of a next-generation flow battery design in a record-setting experiment. A research team from the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory reports that the flow battery, a design optimized ...

New Discovery: Toward sugar origami

Folded carbohydrates could open up completely new perspectives in biomedicine and materials science

06-Jul-2023 - Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces (MPICI) have designed a carbohydrate sequence capable of folding into a stable secondary structure. Until now, such self-folding biopolymers had only been developed for DNA and proteins, and sugars were previously considered too ...

Where did the first sugars come from?

Chemists propose that glyoxylate could have been the original source of sugars on the “prebiotic” Earth

19-Apr-2023 - Two prominent origin-of-life chemists have published a new hypothesis for how the first sugars—which were necessary for life to evolve—arose on the early Earth. In a paper that appeared on April 13, 2023, in the journal Chem, the chemists from Scripps Research and the Georgia Institute of ...

A sweet reaction: Microwaves might increase the sustainability of the chemicals industry

This work will help minimize use of fossil resources in industrial chemicals production

08-Feb-2023 - Much of what the chemicals industry produces, except for metals, is derived from fossil resources. Using renewable biomass and even one-carbon sources—such as formaldehyde—is necessary to increase the sustainability of the chemicals industry. In a study recently published in RSC Advances, ...

Speeding up sugar's conversion into fuel

“We’re only at the dawn of what is a very exciting age in this space”

19-Jan-2023 - University of Queensland researchers have found a way to more efficiently convert sugarcane into a building block of aviation fuel and other products. By zeroing in on a specific enzyme, a UQ team working in collaboration with the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has sped up the slowest step ...

Symbiotic CO₂ Sequestration

Bioengineered microbial community working together to store carbon

14-Dec-2022 - Photosynthesis is a valuable natural system for sequestering carbon dioxide. However, simply forming biomass does not fully exploit this system. A Chinese team of researchers, whose study is published in the journal Angewandte Chemie, has now genetically engineered a microbial community which ...

Distinguish sugars with eye-catching and stretchy rainbow film

02-Dec-2022 - Rainbows and sugar may conjure up images of a certain leprechaun-branded breakfast cereal. But now, researchers in ACS Nano report a kaleidoscope-like film for telling different sweeteners apart that displayed multiple colors when stretched by hand. When evenly stretched with a simple apparatus, ...

Mini-fuel cell generates electricity using the body's sugar

Glucose energy source for medicinal implants and sensors

24-May-2022 - Glucose is the most important energy source in the human body. Scientists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) now want to use the body's sugar as an energy source for medicinal implants. They have developed a glucose fuel cell which ...