title: Polyhydroxyalkanoates, challenges and opportunities.
abstract: Microbial polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) have been developed as biodegradable plastics for the past many years. However, PHA still have only a very limited market. Because of the availability of large amount of shale gas, petroleum will not raise dramatically in price, this situation makes PHA less competitive compared with low cost petroleum based plastics. Therefore, two strategies have been adopted to meet this challenge: first, the development of a super PHA production strain combined with advanced fermentation processes to produce PHA at a low cost; second, the construction of functional PHA production strains with technology to control the precise structures of PHA molecules, this will allow the resulting PHA with high value added applications. The recent systems and synthetic biology approaches allow the above two strategies to be implemented. In the not so distant future, the new technology will allow PHA to be produced with a competitive price compared with petroleum-based plastics.
authors: MOE Key Lab of Bioinformatics, School of Life Science, Tsinghua-Peking Center for Life Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
authors: Ying
authors: Y
authors: Wang
authors: MOE Key Lab of Bioinformatics, School of Life Science, Tsinghua-Peking Center for Life Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
authors: Jin
authors: J
authors: Yin
authors: MOE Key Lab of Bioinformatics, School of Life Science, Tsinghua-Peking Center for Life Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China. Electronic address: chengq@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn.
authors: Guo-Qiang
authors: GQ
authors: Chen
mesh_terms: D001419:Bacteria / Q000737:chemistry / Q000166:cytology / Q000254:growth & development / Q000378:metabolism*; D001709:Biotechnology / Q000191:economics / Q000379:methods*; D054813:Polyhydroxyalkanoates / Q000096:biosynthesis* / Q000737:chemistry
chemical_list: D054813:Polyhydroxyalkanoates