The world is flooded with plastic. There are microplastics even in our testicles. And the vast majority of them are manufactured from fossil fuels, which aggravates our dependence on these non -renewable resources. In Japan, a bioingenier team from the University of Kobe has found a promising solution.
From Pet to PDCA. 95% of the plastics that we use in our day to day are manufactured from oil and gas (98%, if we add coal). In containers, textiles and to the interior of the cars we find a plastic known as polyethylene terephthalate or PET. The objective is to find a high performance alternative to the PET using renewable and biodegradable sources.
Exists. It is called pyridineodycarboxylic acid (PDCA) and is a environment -respecting monomer that, when it is polymerized, has comparable physical properties or even superior to those of the PET. The problem, until now, had been to produce large -scale PDCA. Traditional methods to synthesize it are not very efficient and generate unwanted by -products.
The solution: a bacterium. The novelty of Japanese research, published in the magazine Metabolic Engineeringis that it uses the cellular metabolism of the bacteria Escherichia coli To produce PDCA from glucose. Unlike the previous bioproduction methods, this makes the bacteria assimilate nitrogen and build the compound from beginning to end, eliminating the problem of by -products.
While the existing bioproduction methods They had encountered limitations regarding the quantity and purity of the final compound, bioreactors based on this bacterium are capable of making a clean PDCA synthesis at more than seven times higher concentrations. And with abundant and cheap raw material.
E. coli as factory operators. The process has not been exempt from difficulties. The largest bottleneck was to prevent one of the enzymes introduced into the bacteria to produce hydrogen peroxide, a highly reactive compound that deactivated the enzyme itself.
The researchers managed to overcome this obstacle by refining the crops and adding a compound capable of eliminating hydrogen peroxide. Now they look for a more profitable solution for large -scale production.
The future of bioplastic. Despite the pending challenge, this progress feels the foundations of large -scale plastic microbial synthesis. The practical implementation of bioreactors for the production of high performance PDCA is not only possible, but is a step closer to becoming a reality at an industrial scale.
Image | USDA
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