By South China Morning Post | Created at 2024-09-23 02:58:32 | Updated at 2024-09-30 07:20:41
1 week ago
A group of Chinese scientists has devised a technology to capture carbon dioxide that they hope can be used to convert the gas into lycopene, a powerful antioxidant.
Lycopene is widely used in the pharmaceutical, cosmetics and food industries but the existing production methods have various drawbacks.
For example, extracting it from natural plants is time consuming, uses many raw materials and the resulting product has impurities. Meanwhile chemical synthesis is a laborious and demanding process.
The team at Qingdao Agricultural University in Shandong province developed a synthetic biology technology that aims to get round these problems.
