Video Talk 
Language: English
Alter: 16+
Speaker: Loïc Ronin, Politecnico di Milano, CODOBIO

As integral part of the Horizon Europe framework programme beginning in 2021, there are some missions to reduce global pollution caused by plastics. Indeed, European people want to do away with the marine litter, especially traditional plastics and microplastics. In today’s society, there is an increased attention and demand for sustainable plastics. Polyhydroxyalkanoates are biopolymers which are biodegradable and present great thermal and mechanical properties. They are considered a serious alternative to petroleum-based plastics.
In the framework of the Codobio project, I work on the continuous production of polyhydroxyalkanoates. We use a bacteria strain to produce these biopolymers and we mainly work on the downstream part of this bioprocess. The following figure presents schematically a step of the process that we develop. It is the extraction of intracellular polyhydroxyalkanoates by sonication.

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