Biologically derived polyesters known as polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) represent a potentially "sustainable" replacement to fossil-fuel-based thermoplastics. However, current commercial practices that produce PHA with pure microbial cultures grown on renewable, but refined, feedstocks (i.e., glucose) under sterile conditions do not represent a sustainable commodity. Here, we report on PHA produc...

References 1 Keller, M. and Zengler, K. (2004) Tapping into microbial diversity. Nat. Rev. Microbiol. 2, 141–150 2 DeLuca, T.H. et al. (2002) Quantifying nitrogen-fixation in feather moss carpets of boreal forests. Nature 419, 917–920 5 Cardinale, B.J. et al. (2006) Effects of biodiversity on the functioning o trophic groups and ecosystems. Nature 443, 989–992 6 Tylianakis, J.M. et al. (2008) G...

A microbial depolymerization process of polyethylene glycol is studied with modeling and simulation based on experimental results. Weight distributions before and after cultivation of microbial consortium E1 for two, four, and seven days were introduced into analysis. Inverse problems for a molecular factor and a time factor of a degradation rate were formulated, and those problems were solved ...

Phenanthrene (PHE) is one of the model compounds polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). In this study, a natural PHE-degrading microbial consortium, named HJ-SH, with very high degradation efficiency was isolated from soil exposed to long-term PHE contamination. The results GC analysis showed that consortium HJ-SH degraded 98% 100 mg/L in 3 days and 93% 1000 5 days, an higher than any other c...