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Like the world’s vehicles, the chemical industry runs on petroleum: crude oil is the feedstock from which factories make everything from paints to plastics.
Now, just as oil’s price is rising and its public approval rating falls, researchers at Northwestern University and the private Illinois company LanzaTech have found an alternative: feeding industrial wastes to microbes that process the noxious trash into industrially useful compounds.
The group nominated the bug Clostridium auto to do the job.
They sifted through C. auto’s cell components to find enzymes that could be used to produce acetone, a wide-ranging chemical used in everything from paint thinners to the manufacture of textiles.
The scientists then sequenced the genes for those enzymes and inserted combinations of them into a strain of microbe that was genetically altered to not make other, unwanted substances.
In the end, the bioengineers created versions of C. auto that thrive on waste gases from steel plants and churn out acetone and isopropanol, a chemical with a range of uses, from an ingredient in aftershave lotions and cosmetics to stripping paint.
The team sees no barrier to producing the bugs at commercial scale and expects the same technique could be used to create bacteria that eat the same or other forms of waste to produce common chemicals such as butanol, a common solvent, and the preservative propanediol.
TRENDPOST: The researchers have added another facet to the circular economy, in which waste from one process is a feedstock—literally, in this case—for another. At the same time, feeding waste gases to microbial chemical factories can keep toxins and pollutants out of the air.