{"id":61389,"date":"2019-03-13T07:35:23","date_gmt":"2019-03-13T06:35:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/?p=61389"},"modified":"2019-03-08T11:53:58","modified_gmt":"2019-03-08T10:53:58","slug":"engineered-microbe-may-be-key-to-producing-plastic-from-plants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/engineered-microbe-may-be-key-to-producing-plastic-from-plants\/","title":{"rendered":"Engineered microbe may be key to producing plastic from plants"},"content":{"rendered":"

With a few genetic tweaks, a type of soil bacteria with an appetite for hydrocarbons shows promise as a biological factory for converting a renewable \u2014 but frustratingly untapped \u2014 bounty into a replacement for ubiquitous plastics.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Researchers, like those at the University of Wisconsin\u2013Madison-based, Department of Energy-funded Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, hoping to turn woody plants into a replacement for petroleum in the production of fuels and other chemicals have been after the sugars in the fibrous cellulose that makes up much of the plants\u2019 cell walls.<\/p>\n

\"N-aromaticivorans-rect-500x369\"<\/a>
University of Wisconsin\u2013Madison postdoctoral researcher Alex Linz examines a plate streaked with N. aromaticivorans (in yellow), a soil bacterium that could turn a renewable source \u2014 lignin from plant cells \u2014 into a replacement for petroleum-based plastics. Photo by Chelsea Mamott, GLBRC<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Much of the work of procuring those sugars involves stripping away lignin, a polymer that fills the gaps between cellulose and other chemical components in those cell walls.<\/p>\n

That leaves a lot of useful cellulose, but also a lot of lignin \u2014 which has never carried much value. Paper mills have been stripping lignin from wood to make paper for more than a century, and finding so little value in the lignin that it\u2019s simply burned in the mills\u2019 boilers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey say you can make anything from lignin except money,\u201d says Miguel Perez, a UW\u2013Madison graduate student in civil and environmental engineering.<\/p>\n

But they may not know Novosphingobium aromaticivorans<\/em> as well as he does.<\/p>\n

Perez, civil and environmental engineering professor Daniel Noguera and colleagues at GLBRC and the Wisconsin Energy Institute have published<\/a> in the journal Green Chemistry<\/em> a strategy for employing N. aromaticivorans<\/em> to turn lignin into a more valuable commodity.<\/p>\n

\u201cLignin is the most abundant source \u2014 other than petroleum \u2014 of aromatic compounds on the planet,\u201d Noguera says, like those used to manufacture chemicals and plastics from petroleum. But the large and complex lignin molecule is notoriously hard to efficiently break into useful constituent pieces.<\/p>\n

\"N-aromaticivorans-micro-500x379\"<\/a>
Microscopic N. aromaticivorans<\/em> bacteria, first isolated from soil contaminated by petroleum products, already had a helpful appetite when it met GLBRC scientists. Their genetic tweaks to the microbe could jump-start a renewable plastics industry. Image courtesy of GLBRC<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Enter the bacterium, which was first isolated while thriving in soil rich in aromatic compounds after contamination by petroleum products.<\/p>\n

Where other microbes pick and choose, N. aromaticivorans<\/em> is a biological funnel for the aromatics in lignin. It is unique in that it can digest nearly all of the different pieces of lignin into smaller aromatic hydrocarbons.<\/p>\n

\u201cOther microbes tried before may be able to digest a few types of aromatics found in lignin,\u201d Perez says. \u201cWhen we met this microbe, it was already good at degrading a wide range of compounds. That makes this microbe very promising.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the course of its digestion process, the microbe turns those aromatic compounds into 2-pyrone-4,6-dicarboxylic acid \u2014 more manageably known as PDC. By removing three genes from their microbe, the researchers turned the intermediate PDC into the end of the line. These engineered bacteria became a funnel into which the different lignin pieces go, and out of which PDC flows.<\/p>\n

Bioengineers in Japan have used PDC to make a variety of materials that would be useful for consumer products.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey have found out the compound performs the same or better than the most common petroleum-based additive to PET polymers \u2014 like plastic bottles and synthetic fibers \u2014 which are the most common polymers being produced in the world,\u201d Perez says.<\/p>\n

\"Bildschirmfoto<\/p>\n

It would be an attractive plastic alternative \u2014 one that would break down naturally in the environment, and wouldn\u2019t leach hormone-mimicking compounds into water \u2014 if only PDC were easier to come by.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no industrial process for doing that, because PDC is so difficult to make by existing routes,\u201d says Noguera. \u201cBut if we\u2019re making biofuels from cellulose and producing lignin \u2014 something we used to just burn \u2014 and we can efficiently turn the lignin into PDC, that potentially changes the market for industrial use of this compound.\u201d<\/p>\n

For now, the engineered variation on N. aromaticivorans<\/em> can turn at least 59 percent of lignin\u2019s potentially useful compounds into PDC. But the new study suggests greater potential, and Perez has targets for further manipulation of the microbe.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we can make this pipeline produce at a sufficient rate, with a sufficient yield, we might create a new industry,\u201d Noguera says.<\/p>\n

The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation has filed a patent application on this technology.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This research was funded by grants from the Department of Energy (BER DE-FC02-07ER64494 and DE-SC0018409) and the Chilean National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With a few genetic tweaks, a type of soil bacteria with an appetite for hydrocarbons shows promise as a biological factory for converting a renewable \u2014 but frustratingly untapped \u2014 bounty into a replacement for ubiquitous plastics. Researchers, like those at the University of Wisconsin\u2013Madison-based, Department of Energy-funded Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, hoping to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","nova_meta_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5572],"tags":[5847,6026,11828,12615],"supplier":[6407,333],"class_list":["post-61389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bio-based","tag-bioplastics","tag-biopolymers","tag-lignin","tag-microbes","supplier-glbrc","supplier-university-of-wisconsin-madison"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61389\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61389"},{"taxonomy":"supplier","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/supplier?post=61389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}