Objective
Plastic waste is a significant global environmental challenge due to its environmental persistence and the threat that microplastic poses on living organism. Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) are biopolymers produced by prokaryotes under availability of excess carbon but unfavorable growth conditions. Interestingly, certain types of stress conditions have been proven to increase PHA production in axenic cultures such as oxidative stress or osmotic upshock. PHA stands as one of the main alternatives to traditional plastics as they are biodegradable under a wide range of conditions, but high production cost hampers its wide adoption. Current technologies are based on the use of mixed microbial cultures (MMCs) in open bioreactors feed with industrial by-products to reduce the production cost. However, the PHA productivity using these approaches is low compared to axenic cultures growing on defined media. SalinePHA aims to enhance PHA productivity in bioreactors by using halophilic MMCs. Availability of metagenomic and transcriptomic techniques provides a great opportunity to study the genetic regulation of the PHA synthesis/depolymerization and potential shifts of the metabolism in complex microbial communities under different types of stress. To achieve this, i) halophilic PHA-accumulating MMCs will be obtained by growing environmental inocula under selective pressure and, characterized (performance parameters and shotgun metagenomic sequencing); ii) RNA-seq, RT-PCR, 2D-DIGE experiments will be performed on the best PHA-accumulating MMC under various stress conditions to understand the PHA metabolic regulation. A deeper understanding of the PHA accumulation dynamics will allow for the design of operational parameters by using stress conditions as elicitors to induce high PHA-accumulation in the bioreactor to obtain increased PHA productivity, reducing the cost of its production, allowing the valorization of organic saline waste streams and reducing the use of fresh water.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- engineering and technologyenvironmental biotechnologybioremediationbioreactors
- social scienceseconomics and businesseconomicsproduction economicsproductivity
- engineering and technologyindustrial biotechnologybiomaterialsbioplasticspolyhydroxyalkanoates
You need to log in or register to use this function
We are sorry... an unexpected error occurred during execution.
You need to be authenticated. Your session might have expired.
Thank you for your feedback. You will soon receive an email to confirm the submission. If you have selected to be notified about the reporting status, you will also be contacted when the reporting status will change.
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European FellowshipsCoordinator
1099 085 Lisboa
Portugal