Description
Plastics derived from petrochemical are difficult to eliminate from the environment because of their great stability and low rate of biodegradability. Despite this, its current global production reaches more than 250 million tons, since they are the basis of many products of high consumption in modern society. This disproportionate production generates tremendously negative effects on climate change, among other reasons, due to the increase of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere, a direct result of his non-renewable origin and production/elimination processes. PREDATIC proposes a multidisciplinary approach (System Biology, Applied Biotechnology, Functionalized Materials) to provide an innovative response to one of the great challenges of today´s society, as it is the problem generated by the massive use of plastics derived from petroleum or synthetic polymers produced by non-sustainable processes. The introduction of bioplastics of bacterial origin or polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) on the market requires a reduction in production costs, especially in the processing of the bacterial biomass (downstream) since it is an intracellular bioproduct. Therefore, the design of systems that facilitate the removal of the bacterial PHAs competitively is a key factor for radically diminish the final cost of the product, and that these processes are compatible with the environment. In this sense, PREDATIC proposes as first objective to use the predatory bacterium Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus as biotechnology tool in processes that require cell rupture, such as bacterial bioplastics production processes. Given the broad range of prey that this predator can attack and lyse, the PREDATIC project aims to establish a new system of extraction of intracellular bio-products of wide range of hosts, expandable to gram-negative bacteria used in biotechnology such as Pseudomonas putida and recombinant Escherichia coli.
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