Most polymers contain a considerable amount of lactic acid, which can also form ester bonds. There is normally a lot of lactic acid in the cell, because it is one of the potential products of glucose metabolism. But the researchers have disabled the gene that codes for the primary enzyme that produces with lactic acid, which dramatically reduces the quantity in the polymer.
The researchers also tried different circumstances, which show that they could make polymers who were a mixture of two different amino acid monomers and non-amino acids in the mixture. By adding a few extra enzymes to the E. Coli Sieve, they managed to increase the yield of the polymer to more than 50 percent. They also showed that you could introduce mutations to the enzyme that does polymerization, and it would selectively include more of a specific amino acid in the resulting polymer.
In general, the system that they develop is remarkably flexible, able to include a huge range of chemicals in a polymer. As a result, she should tune the resulting plastic over a wide range of properties. And given the bindings were formed via enzyme, the resulting polymer will almost certainly be biodegradable.
However, there are some negatives. The process does not allow complete control over what is included in the polymer. You can predict it in the direction of a specific mix of amino acids or other chemicals, but you cannot fully prevent the enzyme from being absorbed in the polymer in the polymer at a certain level in the polymer. There is also the issue of purifying the polymer of the rest of the cell components before it is absorbed into production. The production is also relatively slow in comparison with large -scale industrial production.
So it is not completely ready to take over the global plastic production. But the work is great to emphasize the potential of bio-based production.
Nature Chemical Biology, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/S41589-025-01842-2 (About Dois).
