New technologies that make the dye from a single-celled organism can be used to make photocatalysis-based photocatalysers for a variety of applications, from dyeing clothing to cleaning up polluted rivers.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Office of Technology Development (OSTD) said the new technology will allow researchers to easily make the pigment from a group of bacteria called Bacteroidetes, and will allow them to make the chemical by-product of the process.
Researchers have used the technique to make a color-changing dye, but this is the first time it’s been able to make pigment from microbes.
“It’s a very interesting technology that allows us to do something we never did before,” said Timothy Siegel, director of the OSTD’s Microbiomaterials Division.
The technique also could have a big impact on the development of biodegradable plastics and bioplastics, which are commonly used in plastics and biofuels.
The bacteria in question are E. coli, which has been used for decades to make bioproducts that are used as feedstock for biocatalytic processes, including making biocontrol agents.
The process is based on two main principles.
First, the bacteria break down cellulose, the building blocks of cellulose.
Next, they break down some amino acids, the same amino acids that make up most proteins.
This breaks down the cellulose into the various chemical components that make it biodegradeable.
“The cellulose breaks down in the Bactero, which is the group that’s responsible for the process, but then the bacteria breaks down some of the amino acids to make some of those chemicals,” Siegel said.
Siegel and his colleagues at the National Institutes of Health and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, along with colleagues at Rice University, University of California, San Diego, and the University of Utah, published their findings in the journal Science.
The scientists said that the process can be made using simple agar plates or a simple polymer substrate.
“In our tests, we were able to break down these cellulose in two weeks by using a simple, inexpensive agar plate,” Salkow said.
“We were able do this using a substrate that can break down the material to a level where you can break it down into different chemicals that you can make biodegrades.”
The process involves a bacteria that can be cultured to produce the pigment.
The researchers found that they could use this bacteria to break up cellulose using an enzyme called spirochete reductase, which can be produced by bacteria in the lab.
The enzyme, which also can be found in other bacteria, breaks down cellulase, a key step in breaking down proteins, Salkowski said.
The enzymes used to produce enzymes also could be useful in other industries.
The team also made pigment using a process called hydrolysis that requires the bacteria to cut a cellulose molecule into a chain of molecules.
When these chains are broken down, the resulting pigment is made from carbon monoxide and other gases.
The pigments can be deposited on surfaces to make clothing, biofuel or other products.
Salkows team has applied the process to other cellulose-producing bacteria, such as Escherichia coli, and hopes to use the technology to make more biodegradation-resistant materials.
“If we can make a biodegrading material, we can actually do something with it,” Sankow said, adding that the company hopes to start producing the pigments in 2018.
In addition to improving the process for making photocatads, the technology could be a way to make new materials that can better protect the environment, such like the biofuil.
“I think this is really a big breakthrough in the bioprocessing field,” Sargeant said.
This is the second time the researchers have used a bacteria for the production of the pigment in their research.
Earlier this year, they made a photocatalogue of the cellulosic compound that is used to create biodegens from algae.
Sankowski said that if he had the funding, he would be interested in using the same technique to produce photocatadiels.
“There are many ways we could make these, but one of them is to make these in a lab that is more productive than what we have now,” Sanksi said.
