Istanbul:

Amid food safety concerns, Chinese scientists have developed a method of making protein using methanol derived from coal, a study has revealed.

Chinese scientists used nearly 20,000 samples of yeast collected from vineyards, forests and marshlands across the country to arrive at a successful alternative to meet the demand for animal feed, the daily South China Morning Post reported. used and this process has been introduced on an industrial scale. on Monday.

The world’s second-largest economy is heavily dependent on imports of hundreds of tons of soybeans needed for animal feed.

“Coal with global reserves of about 1.07 trillion tonnes can be converted into methanol through coal gasification. Methanol mixes well with water, providing higher efficiency in fermentation processes than gaseous substrates and eliminating the need for special fermentation equipment,” Professor Wu Xin wrote in China Science Bulletin.

Wu leads a team of scientists at the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

After developing protein production techniques – cheaper than conventional protein biosynthesis – scientists “identified strains capable of efficiently using various sugars and alcohols as carbon sources.”

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It is not yet known where scientists began to produce and produce thousands of tons of this protein.

“They created a yeast with significantly improved methanol tolerance and metabolic efficiency. This engineering dramatically promoted the targeted conversion of methanol to proteins,” the report said.

According to CAS, “…and the methanol-to-protein conversion efficiency reached 92% of the theoretical value.”

Since the conversion rate is high, this “makes this protein production method very attractive economically.”

“It requires no arable land, is unaffected by weather and climate, and is a thousand times more efficient than traditional farming practices,” Wu said.