About the Seminar:

With the ever-growing global plastics crisis causing consistent damage to environmental and human health, creating new and better biodegradable plastics is of the utmost importance. Poly(3-hydroxybutyrate) (P3HB), a biologically produced aliphatic polyester with an absolute stereoconfiguration of (R), is a great biodegradable candidate to replace commodity plastics having high strength and thermal properties with complete biodegradation in unmanaged conditions. One of the major reasons P3HB has not yet been widely commercialized is its extreme brittleness due to its perfectly isotactic stereomicrostructure. In this work modifications to the enzyme used to create P3HB, PHA synthase (PhaC), are proposed to create stereodiverse P3HBs, which have been previously synthesized chemically and shown to be much less brittle materials due to introduced stereoerrors. Overall, this work aims to create mutants of PhaC that can incorporate both diastereomers of 3-hydroxybutyryl-CoA to create stereodiverse P3HBs and subsequently compare these biologically derived P3HBs to current chemically derived P3HBs.