Mighty Dons Of Science News

Sci­en­tists say they have man­aged to make plas­tics through “bio-en­gi­neer­ing” rath­er than through the use of fos­sil fu­els that con­trib­ute to glob­al warm­ing.

The find­ings are pub­lished in two pa­pers in the jour­nal Bi­o­tech­nol­ogy and Bi­o­en­gi­neer­ing to mark the jour­nal’s 50th an­ni­ver­sa­ry.

Poly­mers are mo­le­cules found in eve­ry­day life in the form of plas­tics and rub­bers. The re­search­ers, from Ko­rea Ad­vanced In­sti­tute of Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy and Ko­re­an chem­i­cal com­pa­ny LG Chem, fo­cused their re­search on poly­lac­tic ac­id, a bi­o­log­ic­ally-based pol­y­mer.

“The polyesters and oth­er pol­y­mers we use eve­ry­day are mostly de­rived from fos­sil oils made through the re­fin­ery or chem­i­cal pro­cess,” said In­sti­tute re­searcher Sang Yup Lee. Poly­lac­tic ac­id “is con­sid­ered a good al­ter­na­tive to petroleum-based plas­tics as it is both bi­o­de­grad­able and has a low tox­icity to hu­mans.”

Un­til now the pol­y­mer had been pro­duced in a com­plex, costly two-step chem­i­cal pro­cess, he added. Lee’s team de­vel­oped a one-stage pro­cess in which en­gi­neered E. coli bac­te­ria pro­duced poly­lac­tic ac­id and as­so­ci­at­ed pol­y­mers through fer­menta­t­ion, a met­a­bol­ic pro­cess.

“This means that a de­vel­oped E. coli strain is now ca­pa­ble of ef­fi­ciently pro­duc­ing un­nat­u­ral pol­y­mers, through a one-step fer­menta­t­ion pro­cess,” he said.

“Global warm­ing and oth­er en­vi­ron­men­tal prob­lems are urg­ing us to de­vel­op sus­tain­a­ble pro­cesses based on re­new­able re­sources,” added Lee. “This new strat­e­gy should be gen­er­ally use­ful for de­vel­oping oth­er en­gi­neered or­gan­isms ca­pa­ble of pro­duc­ing var­i­ous un­nat­u­ral pol­y­mers by di­rect fer­menta­t­ion from re­new­able re­sources.”