Future Starch ——Challenges and Reflections on Starch from New Sources

Abstract

Starch serves as the primary energy source for human activities and is utilized as a crucial raw material in various industries. However, due to limited land resources and challenging yield growth, the traditional starch-producing plants are significantly influenced by environmental conditions, which made it unable to meet the demands of population expansion. On the other hand, the traditional source of starch exhibits a relatively stable structure but faces performance limitations that fail to fully meet application requirements. Consequently, structural modifications have been often employed to effectively regulate the performance of starch. Chemical modification is a commonly employed method for controlling performance, but it can pose potential risks to food safety due to the occurrence of chemical reactions caused by limited reagents, residues of chemical auxiliary materials, generation of by-products, and the introduction of new chemical groups into starch molecules. Therefore, the traditional starch resources are inadequate to meet the demands of sustainable development. It is imperative to explore novel starch resources possessing “future characteristics”. According to their characteristics, the sources of future starch could be divided into three categories: firstly, the traditional starch source plants could be genetic breeding or gene edited to achieve directional or site-directed transformation of starch structure, making starch with special application performance; secondly, new starch resources that could overcome the limitations of land and natural environment, or are rich in starch but have not been fully developed and utilized; thirdly, new cell-free synthetic starch that does not take plants and microorganisms as carriers. This review elucidates the necessity, feasibility and development trend of future starch development, and emphasizes on the research status and characteristics of three types of future starch, taking high amylose starch, waxy starch, duckweed starch, microalgae starch, CO2 synthetic starch and polysaccharide biosynthesis starch as examples. This review will provide valuable guidance for future advancements in starch development.

Keywords

• starch
• duckweed
• microalgae
• structure
• modify
• gene editing
• starches synthesized without the cells
• developing trends of future starches