Manufacturing polymers is a messy business. When producing everything from plastics to pharmaceuticals, companies harvest petroleum, ship it to a factory, and then chemically process it, often generating massive amounts of pollution through emissions and hazardous chemical waste. Microscopic Escherichia coli bacteria, though often associated with contamination, may hold the key to a cleaner solution, according to students from #harvardseas. The students, who won a bronze medal at the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition, enhanced the process of biological synthesis with E. coli in an effort to make this environmentally friendly production method more affordable and accessible. “If you use this genetic machinery, instead of chemical processing, all you have as an input is whatever goes into the cell culture, and then you are able to extract from that cell culture the material that you want,” said Reggie St. Louis, S.B. ’18, a bioengineering concentrator. “There is not too much processing that needs to happen along the way. You just need to manage your cell culture and then you have this factory that is pumping out whatever you need.”⠀ #Harvard #students #project #team #syntheticbiology #synbio #bacteria #environmentallyfriendly #igem #igem2017 @igem_hq (at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences)
