Petroleum-based plastics and their non-biodegradable derivatives can't be overlooked because they're used in almost every aspect of our lives, including packaging, textiles, agriculture, electronics, medical, building construction, injection, and moulding. Consumption of these materials is increasing every day, resulting in increased pollution, global warming, and waste management costs, as well as a threat to biodiversity and life on Earth. Because our planet, among the countless planets in space, is the only one with life, it must be protected by reducing pollution and implementing other regulatory measures. Biodegradable plastics should so be used instead of non-biodegradable plastics. Within the poly-hydroxyalkanoates family, poly-3-hydroxybutyrate (PHB) has been extensively studied and is the best-characterized biodegradable plastic. It's used in a variety of household and packaging items, as well as medical devices. Despite the fact that biodegradable PHB is environmentally friendly and does not require fossil fuels, it has traditionally been prohibitively expensive to manufacture using bacterial fermentation processes involving recombinant E. coli. Recombinant diatoms and transgenic plants have also been investigated for efficient PHB synthesis. However, increasing PHB yield to the theoretical maximum level has proven to be extremely difficult, making industrial scale production impossible. The goal of this chapter is to emphasise the importance of metabolic pathway manipulations in recombinant E. coli in order to address these issues. The main benefit of using genetically engineered E. coli is that PHB granules are not degraded once synthesised, unlike native producers, because they lack PHB degradation pathways. Other advantages of using recombinant E. coli include their ability to I use a variety of low-cost carbon sources, (ii) accumulate large amounts of polymers with higher productivity, (iii) maintain high-cell density fermentation, and (iv) efficiently recover PHB. Because no single technique has yet been proven to be sufficient for producing PHB industrially, this chapter has also shed light on the development of sophisticated and integrated ways for efficient PHB production in order to compete with non-biodegradable petrochemical plastics.
Author (S) Details
Md. Mohiuddin Kabir
Department of Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology East West University, Dhaka-1212, Bangladesh.
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