subject: The Current Situation of Biochemical Industry in China [print this page] The Current Situation of Biochemical Industry in China
Biochemical engineering is a mixture of chemical engineering and biotechnology. Biochemical industry is an important branch of biotechnology. On the basis of life sciences, biotechnology makes use of methodology of natural science and mechanical engineering principles to conduct the processing of raw materials through biological agents so as to provide technology for products and service. As a new emerging industry, biochemical industry is formed to make use of biological and chemical engineering technologies to produce useful products for people on the basis of basic study on biochemical industry. Compared with traditional chemical industry, biochemical industry has many obvious advantages: (1) takes renewable resources as raw materials; (2) conducts an efficient production process with good selectivity less energy consumption at ambient temperatures and pressures; (3) makes less pollutions; (4) consumes less investments; (5) is able to produce products with perfect performances which can not be produced by present technology or are rather difficult to be produced by chemical method. Because of these advantages, biochemical industry has been an important field among chemical industries.
At present, the application of biochemical technology has already involved every aspect of people's daily life, including agricultural production, medicine and health, foods, environmental protection, and resources development. After a long-term development, biochemical industry in our country has formed its own foundation. Especially after the reformation and opening, biochemical industry has entered a new stage. Nowadays, biochemical products have also been connected to medicine, health care, pesticide, foods, forages and organic acid. The main products and technologies include chemicals produced by biological method and environmental biotechnology.
(1) chemicals produced by biological method
Organic acid and amino acid: the output and consumption of monosodium glutamate in our country rank the top level in the world; the output and export volume of citric acid also ranks the first place worldwide; the technology of enzymatic synthesis of tartaric acid and propanoic acid reaches the world's advanced level. Biochemical technology can also be applied to petrochemical industry. Take aspartic acid for example. Aspartic acid is produced by enzymatic method with maleic anhydride and fumaric acid as raw materials.
Chemical products: the development of antibiotic development is rather rapid, and the output of penicillin ranks the top class in the world. Among other biochemical drugs, some of them have formed their own industrialized scale, such as interferon, interleukin and recombinant hepatitis vaccines. In addition, pesticides like bacillus thuringiensis, validamycin and gibberellin have also formed their own industrialized scale. In addition, the application of biochemical technology in petrochemical industry has also achieved great developments. For example, industrialized equipment of dibasic acid has been established in our country.
(2) environmental biotechnology
The biological degradation of toxic substances: Our country has obtained some achievements in industrializing biological degradation of wastewater and petroleum in soils. Biological degradation of petroleum has been applied to the treatment of oil spill. The study on the degradation of toxic substances like phenol and halogenated hydrocarbon has been conducted abroad.
Microbial desulfurization: many institutions at home have already conducted their study on bio-desulfurization, such as Shandong University who has obtained high-efficiency bacteria.
