Scientists Find New Way to Sustainably Make Chemicals by Copying Nature's Tricks
Phoenix666 writes:
Currently, many useful chemicals are produced from fossil fuels, which require mining, are of limited supply, and disrupt the carbon cycle. An alternative is to engineer microorganisms like Escherichia coli (E. coli) and cyanobacteria to more sustainably produce the chemicals directly from atmospheric carbon dioxide.
However, many of the chemicals that can be produced this way are toxic to the microorganisms, reducing their ability to make large quantities in a cost-effective way.
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Organisms like plants and yeasts sometimes produce chemicals that are toxic to them, so to store them safely, they make small modifications to the chemicals to render them harmless. The resulting chemicals are known as 'derivatives', and can be returned to the original, toxic form through relatively simple chemistry.The team took this idea and used genetic engineering to program E. coli and cyanobacteria to make 1-octanol, a chemical currently used in perfumes, which is toxic to the bacteria. They then added an extra set of instructions to E. coli so it would produce two different derivatives of 1-octanol that are both less harmful.
Judging from the photo in the article, it's a green way to produce the chemicals we require.
More information:
Pachara Sattayawat el al., "Bioderivatization as a concept for renewable production of chemicals that are toxic or poorly soluble in the liquid phase," PNAS (2019). www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1914069117
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