Part 31 Article: Biotechnology My Blog Title: The world, from the past to the present, retold from the timelines. Click on PDF to download from Part 3 2023: [9.16] Notable innovations: a genetically engineered marine microorganism for breaking down PET in salt water. This was exciting because we needed to address plastic pollution in marine environments, said Nathan Crook, corresponding author of a paper on the work and an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at North Carolina State University. One option was to pull the plastic out of the water and put it in a landfill, but that posed challenges of its own. It would be better if we could break these plastics down into products that could be reused. For that to work, you needed an inexpensive way to break the plastic down. Our work here was a big step in that direction. To address this challenge, the researchers worked with two species of bacteria. The first bacterium, Vibrio natriegens, thrives in saltwater and...
Part 31
Article: Biotechnology My Blog Title: The world, from the past to the present, retold from the timelines.
Click on PDF to download from Part 3
2023: [9.16] Notable innovations: a genetically engineered marine microorganism for breaking down PET in salt water. This was exciting because we needed to address plastic pollution in marine environments, said Nathan Crook, corresponding author of a paper on the work and an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at North Carolina State University. One option was to pull the plastic out of the water and put it in a landfill, but that posed challenges of its own. It would be better if we could break these plastics down into products that could be reused. For that to work, you needed an inexpensive way to break the plastic down. Our work here was a big step in that direction. To address this challenge, the researchers worked with two species of bacteria. The first bacterium, Vibrio natriegens, thrives in saltwater and is remarkable, in part, because it reproduces very quickly. The second bacterium, Ideonella sakaiensis, is remarkable because it produces enzymes that allow it to break down PET and eat it. The researchers took the DNA from I. sakaiensis that is responsible for producing the enzymes that break down plastic, and incorporated that genetic sequence into a plasmid. Plasmids are genetic sequences that can replicate in a cell, independent of the cell’s own chromosome. In other words, you could sneak a plasmid into a foreign cell, and that cell will carry out the instructions in the plasmid’s DNA. And that’s exactly what the researchers did here. From a practical standpoint, this was also the first genetically engineered organism that we knew of that was capable of breaking down PET microplastics in saltwater, said Tianyu Li, first author of the paper and a Ph.D. student at NC State. That’s important, because it was not economically feasible to remove plastics from the ocean and rinse high concentration salts off before beginning any processes related to breaking the plastic down. However, while this was an important first step, there were still three significant hurdles, Crook said. First, we’d like to incorporate the DNA from I. sakaiensis directly into the genome of V. natriegens, which would make the production of plastic-degrading enzymes a more stable feature of the modified organisms. Second, we needed to further modify V. natriegens so that it was capable of feeding on the byproducts it produces when it breaks down the PET. Lastly, we needed to modify the V. natriegens to produce a desirable end product from the PET such as a molecule that was a useful feedstock for the chemical industry. Honestly, that third challenge was the easiest of the three, said Crook. Breaking down the PET in saltwater was the most challenging part. We were also open to talking with industry groups to learn more about which molecules would be most desirable for us to engineer the V. natriegens into producing, Crook said. Given the range of molecules we could induce the bacteria to produce, and the potentially vast scale of production, which molecules could industry provide a market for? The paper was co-authored by Stefano Menegatti, an associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at North Carolina State University. The work was done with support from the National Science Foundation. The paper, “Breakdown of PET microplastics under saltwater conditions using engineered Vibrio natriegens,” was published open access in the AIChE Journal.
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Music Sources and Titles: Pixabay
[Content composition of “In-Brief Archives Facebook Page” and of my blogger page “www.ilovemytimeoranothertimeofyours.blogspot.com” in sound and music does not represent the pictures, videos and text contents.] [Music volume is increased if deviated from the actual files.]
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Picture sources: Peakpx.com and Pexels, Pixabay in PowerDirector and other websites:
2:https://cdn.zmescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/plastic-waste.jpg
3:https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/hires/2023/genetically-modified-b.jpg
4:https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/368202346450951-1464797688811_Q512/Nathan-Crook.jpg
5:https://www.aiche.org/community/bio/nathan-crook
6:https://ocf.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/ncstate-campus-life-1024x576.jpg
11:https://particle.scitech.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/plastic-types-1024x616.png
15:https://www.greenyway.com/media/gocms/2017/02/Bact2-699x466.jpg
16:https://www.isaaa.org/kc/cropbiotechupdate/files/images/920202374050AM.jpg
18:https://engr.ncsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Microplastics-illustration-768x723.jpg
23:https://cdn.technologynetworks.com/tn/images/body/picture-by-y-zhang1617788718746.jpg
24:https://www.aiche.org/sites/default/files/images/courses/shutterstock_526595785.jpg
25:https://cbe.ncsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/faculty-menegatti.jpg
26:https://engr.ncsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/menegatti-stefano-720x405.png
Video Sources: Pexels and Pixabay in PowerDirector and other websites:
30:https://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/item/112127754-result-colored-recycled-plastic-bottles-side-view
31:https://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/item/112127771-result-colored-recycled-plastic-bottles-pan
36:https://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/item/171516229-floating-excavator-removing-waste-sea
41:https://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/item/148185331-plastic-recycling-plant-conveyor-shredded-plastic
43:https://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/item/147472985-blade-shaft-pet-plastic-washing-machine
55:https://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/item/165083791-conveyor-crushed-plastic
58:https://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/item/234109238-3d-animation-bacteria-colony
59:https://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/item/105255267-synthetic-bacteria-releasing-products
60:https://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/item/157592268-close-petri-dish-bacteria-desk-laboratory
61:https://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/item/33661694-bacteria-under-microscope
63:https://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/item/116911982-bloomin-cyanobacteria-ocean-surfaceg
65:https://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/item/88394851-cloning-bacteria-beautiful-3d-animation
66:https://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/item/263150772-bacteria-anatomy-and-morphology
67:https://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/item/263149939-capsule-and-slime-layer-bacteria
68:https://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/item/232967611-waste-eating-bacteria-3d-animation-render
69:https://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/item/105258545-synthetic-bacteria-releasing-products
70:https://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/item/105251159-synthetic-bacteria-releasing-products
72:https://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/item/232967612-waste-eating-bacteria-3d-animation-render
74:https://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/item/291131172-molecule-cell-chemistry-structure-formula
Consulted References:
Refer to Part 3 for all consolidated references for all parts.
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