A new research result from Nankai University has successfully obtained a large number of high-purity “plant gold†lycopene from natural seaweed plants. The research results have been selected into the "Special Scientific Research Project of Marine Public Welfare Industries" of the State Oceanic Administration.
Lycopene, known as "plant gold," belongs to carotenoids and is one of the strongest antioxidants found in nature today. The study found that it has preventive and therapeutic effects on cancers such as prostate cancer, breast cancer, and pancreatic cancer, vascular sclerosis, and coronary heart disease. In addition, it is also selected as one of the top ten health food additives for modern people.
Lycopene has a broad market prospect. At present, the method for obtaining lycopene is mainly extracted from tomatoes, and chemically synthesized and fermented by microorganisms. Each of the three methods has its own drawbacks. The content of tomato raw materials is too low and the production cost is high. The chemical synthesis products not only have poor physiological functions, but also can not show their advantages in the market because of people's concerns about their toxic and side effects; The supply of synthetic precursors is limited, and there is no substantial breakthrough in production efficiency.
Nankai University will adopt a gene knockout technique to redesign the metabolic pathway of Dunaliella salina carotenoids to obtain a new D. salina variety with a lycopene content of more than 6% dry weight. It is estimated that the unit content of lycopene in this cultivar is 1500 times that of tomato and 100 times that of microbial fermentation bacteria, which is much higher than the level of similar research at home and abroad.
The head of the project team, Professor Chen Defu of the School of Life Sciences of Nankai University, said: "D. salina is a salt-producing, cell-free single-celled green algae, and the highest content of beta-carotene, if it is artificially disrupted. The function of the intracellular lycopene β-cyclase gene allows lycopene to no longer be metabolized into β-carotene, which is accumulated and stored in cells, and the intracellular lycopene content will increase dramatically.â€
Gene knockout technology is a genetic engineering technology developed in the late 1980s and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 2007. It has fixed and quantified the genome at the DNA level in a certain way to achieve accurate genomes. The purpose of the transformation. "It provides us with the possibility of disrupting the strong lycopene β-cyclase function in Dunaliella salina," said Chen Defu.
It is reported that this project will be cooperated by Nankai University and China Salt Salt Engineering Technology Research Institute. At the same time, technological development will transform the existing conditions and technologies into a production workshop with an annual output of 1,000 kilograms of lycopene-rich algae powder. Safe and functional new lycopene product.
This new seaweed is not only suitable for the Tianjin coast natural environment, but also has the advantages of genetic stability, high yield, low cost, safety and health, and simple process. (Zhu Hong, Ping Yang)