Plastics! Plastics! Plastics! It turns out they don't have to be environment destroyers.
On November 28, the University of Toronto, University of British Columbia and Concordia University announced the formation of the Industrial Biocatalysis Network (IBN). Funded through a $5-million grant by the
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the partnership will see some of Canada's leading bio-chemical engineers try to find enzymes that produce byproducts that enable the creation of environmentally-friendly chemicals and plastics.
The team is being lead by Professor Elizabeth Edwards, a member of UofT's Faculty of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry. The study is excepted to take five years and will involve several partners from Canada's manufacturing industry.
Professor Edwards and her colleagues decided to embark on this project after completing a study that saw them sequence thousands of different enzymes. “Rather than doing more sequencing, we decided we wanted to focus on what these enzymes actually do,” she says. “We want to find out what their jobs are and how we can put them to use.”
Part of the reason several universities have partnered on this project is to avoid potential overlap and to increase the speed at which the research team is able to zero in on promising leads. “There are thousands of reactions we could potentially look at... and the goal of this network is to help prioritize what we look at. That’s the value of a network: communication and exchange of information and knowledge,” says Professor Edwards.
With even more evidence that the world is going through a period of significant climate change as a result of human activity, Edwards and her team are all too aware of the importance of their research. “There are more people than twice as many people on the planet than when I was born. The pressures on us to adapt are immense, so much so that I don’t like to think where we’ll be if we don’t,” she says. “Everyone feels this pressure and everyone aspires—and deserves—a great standard of living, so we need to come up with solutions that are different from the ones we've used in the past.”
Source: University of Toronto
Photo courtesy of Sara Collaton.