Mountains of used plastic bottles get thrown away every day, but microbes could potentially tackle this problem.
Now, researchers in ACS Central Science report that they’ve developed a #plastic-eating E. coli that can efficiently turn polyethylene terephthalate (PET) waste into adipic acid, which is used to make nylon materials, drugs and fragrances.
Utilizing #Biosynthetic Pathways to Make Adipic Acid:
Previously, a team of researchers including Stephen Wallace engineered a strain of E. coli to transform the main component in old #PETbottles, terephthalic acid, into something tastier and more valuable: the vanilla flavor compound vanillin.
At the same time, other researchers engineered microbes to metabolize terephthalic acid into a variety of small molecules, including short acids. So, Wallace and a new team from the University of Edinburgh wanted to expand E. coli’s biosynthetic pathways to include the metabolism of terephthalic acid into adipic acid, a #feedstock for many everyday products that’s typically generated from fossil fuels using energy-intensive processes.
The team developed a new E. coli strain that produced #enzymes that could transform terephthalic acid into compounds such as #muconic acid and adipic acid. Then, to transform the muconic acid into adipic acid, they used a second type of E. coli, which produced hydrogen gas, and a palladium catalyst.
In experiments, the team found that attaching the engineered microbial cells to alginate hydrogel beads improved their efficiency, and up to 79% of the #terephthalicacid was converted into adipic acid. Using real-world samples of terephthalic acid from a discarded bottle and a coating taken from waste packaging labels, the engineered #Ecoli system efficiently produced #adipicacid. In the future, the researchers say they will look for pathways to biosynthesize additional higher-value products.
Source: American Chemical Society/specialchem
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