Inspiration:

This is a real story.

A classmate of one JNFLS team member was diagnosed as leukemia in this spring. His family’s house had just been decorated last year, and his doctor told him, that was the most probably causes of his disease! All team members were astonished when they heard this news at our second brainstorm meetup, so we decided to focus on formaldehyde which is the major pollutant indoors for our project. In the following time, we searched for lots of document literature relevant to formaldehyde.

Description:

1. What diseases does formaldehyde cause?

As we know, formaldehyde is very toxic to human bodies. Besides leukemia, formaldehyde may cause other severe disease showed as following picture (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Diseases caused by formaldehyde.

2. What problems are there in eliminating formaldehyde?

According to the 2019 national statistical data of formaldehyde and other in-door air pollutant in China, among 6482 sites tested, the unqualified rate was 74%, and only 26% of them were qualified. Such inveterate in-door formaldehyde pollution is resulted mainly from four reasons. Primarily, the continuous long cycle emitting made totally eradication hard to do. Secondly, the low efficiency and environmental unsafety of existing measures will cause undesired side effect which may influence the deployment of processing devices. Moreover, every home-use measures can not avoid the limited absorbing amount and longtime requirement. The last and most significant problem is that such eliminating formaldehyde gas is a kind of resource waste because this small molecular could be converted to some other useful chemicals.

3. How to solve these problems?

In order to inspire the project design, we investigated the knowledge of formaldehyde pollution into public. The results showed that people pay more attention to indoor formaldehyde pollution and prefer to adopt safe and environmentally friendly methods to effectively reduce the formaldehyde. However, traditional measures to eliminate in-door formaldehyde mainly based on ventilation, absorption, chemisorption, and plant absorption. Every method above are limited due to either low efficiency or environmental unsafety. Also, none of these home-use measures can utilize the formaldehyde collected.

With the current demand for in-door air purification increasing and the aspiration for utilization of formaldehyde, we aimed to construct a device which can meet the two requirements with environmental safety, high efficiency, stability and waste utility at the same time.

4. How to achieve our goal?

To achieve our goal, we did comprehensive search into the past data about formaldehyde metabolism, and we know that formaldehyde can be converted to xylulose, which is a precursor for the synthesis of a variety of rare sugars. In medicine, xylulose can inhibit intestinal sucrase and maltase activity, thereby inhibiting postprandial blood sugar rise. xylulose can also react with ATP to enter the pentose phosphate pathway and participate in the central metabolic pathway. The usage of xylulose ia summarized in Figure 3.

Figure 2. The usage summary of xylulose.

Xylulose is very useful and expensive. In laboratories, pure xylulose can be sold at a price of 400 yuan per 25ml due to the high production cost which brought by the high reliance on biological xylulose reductase conversion. To meet the market requirement, a relatively cheaper method needs to be found out to expand the production and reduce the cost.

Considering the demand for eliminating formaldehyde indoors and the rising desire for xylulose production, there supposed to have new synthetic biological measure to solve the hazards and difficulties existed.

Therefore, we devoted ourselves to develop a new device, using synthetic biological method to eliminate formaldehyde indoor in a preferable efficiency while transform and utilize this toxic gas into useful chemical----xylulose.

Figure 3. Our project intention, producing xylulose while removing formaldehyde indoors.

References:

[1] gz.zol.com.cn/486/4863672.html?from=bdshare

[2] http://igem-whu.github.io/igem2014/

[3] http://igem-whu.github.io/igem2014/

[4] http://www.xjishu.com/zhuanli/27/201710725974.html/

[5] Siegel, Justin B et al. Computational Protein Design Enables a Novel One-Carbon Assimilation Pathway. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 2015,112(12): 3704–9.

[6] Bo Cui, Bingzhao Zhuo, Xiaoyun Lu, et al. Enzymatic synthesis of xylulose from formaldehyde. Chinese Journal of Biotechnology, 2018, 34(7): 1128−1136.

[7] Xiaoyun Lu, Yuwan Liu, Yiqun Yang, et al. Constructing a synthetic pathway for acetyl coenzyme A from one-carbon through enzyme design. Nature communications, 2019 Mar 26;10(1):1378.