Yeast littered with light-trapping nanoparticles becomes much more efficient in the industrial synthesis of valuable substances.
In modern industry, countless lines of yeast cells are used to fill huge fermenters and produce the necessary substances - usually from simple sugar molecules. Biosynthesis does not require high temperatures, pressures, and other hazardous and costly techniques often required for conventional chemical synthesis. On the other hand, a considerable part of the resources going into the bioreactor is uneconomically spent on the vital activity of the yeast itself, and the problem of increasing the efficiency of biosynthesis remains urgent.
A new original approach to this problem was proposed by developers from Harvard University, whose article was published in the journal Nature. Junling Guo and his colleagues were able to coat fungal cells with nanoparticles of indium phosphide: this semiconductor is able to capture the energy of solar radiation and reduce the consumption of chemical resources used for yeast metabolism.
The fact is that a great many biochemical reactions in cells occur through the mediation of the coenzyme NADP. It is restored - it takes on an electron (for example, in chloroplasts of plants during phonosynthesis), and then gives it up (for example, during photosynthetic synthesis of glucose). Semiconductor nanoparticles actually carry out a similar process: photons knock out electrons from them, which enter the cell and stimulate the restoration of NADP.
A portion of the yeast nutrition previously spent on this task can be used for industrially valuable synthesis. This was confirmed by the experiments carried out by the authors in the laboratory: the production of shikimic acid (the basis for obtaining the popular antiviral agent "Tamiflu") by cells carrying semiconductor nanoparticles "solar batteries" on the surface turned out to be three times more effective than that of ordinary yeast.
Sergey Vasiliev
