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A recent research found that pyridinedicarboxylic acid (PDCA), an alternative to PET (polyethylene terephthalate), is biodegradable and has better physical qualities. A group of bioengineers from Kobe University produced E. coli bacteria that could make PDCA from glucose at previously unseen amounts and without any byproducts, opening up a world of potential applications for bioengineering in the future. The journal Metabolic Engineering has published the results.
Plastics’ durability is the reason for their common usage as well as the environmental issues they cause. They are also mostly derived from petroleum, which renders them nonrenewable and geopolitically dependent. Globally, research teams are working on biodegradable and natural substitutes, however yield, purity, and the resulting manufacturing costs are often problematic.
The majority of biomass-based production techniques concentrate on carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen molecules. Although there are very promising molecules for high-performance plastics that include nitrogen and other elements, there are currently no effective bioproduction methods. Furthermore, unintended byproducts are a natural result of pure chemical processes.
One such contender is PDCA. It is biodegradable, and materials that include it have physical qualities that are on par with or even better than those of PET, which is often used in fabrics and containers.
The team attempted an innovative approach to the problem: they wanted to use cellular metabolism to take in nitrogen and generate the molecule from the ground up.
The group from Kobe University has now produced PDCA in bioreactors at concentrations that are more than seven times greater than those that have been previously documented.
The discovery is significant because it shows that nitrogen can be incorporated into metabolic pathways without generating undesirable byproducts, allowing for the target chemical to be synthesized cleanly and effectively.
But along the road, the crew did had to deal with a few difficult problems. The most troublesome of these occurred when they identified a bottleneck in which one of the enzymes they had added generated the very reactive substance called hydrogen peroxide. The enzyme that generated it was subsequently deactivated by the reactive chemical.
The researchers could eventually solve the problem by improving the culture conditions, specifically by introducing a substance that can absorb hydrogen peroxide. However, this addition would create further logistical and economic obstacles for large-scale manufacturing.
Every issue points to a solution, and the bioengineers already have ideas on how to increase output moving ahead. The following stages toward practical application are made possible by the ability to acquire enough quantities in bioreactors. However, more broadly, the success of adding nitrogen metabolism enzymes expands the range of chemicals that may be produced by microbial synthesis, thereby increasing the potential of bio-manufacturing.
Sources:
Akinobu Katano et al. (2025). Biosynthesis of 2,5-pyridinedicarboxylate from glucose via p-aminobenzoic acid in Escherichia coli, Metabolic Engineering. DOI: 10.1016/j.ymben.2025.08.011
Engineered E. coli produce biodegradable plastic that outperforms widely used PET. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-coli-biodegradable-plastic-outperforms-widely.html
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