New progress in PHA bioplastic sources

More than a decade of work on developing plant-based PHAs is beginning to bear fruit
.
Yield10 Bioscience, an agricultural bioscience company headquartered in Woburn, Massachusetts, has now announced the latest development of shepherd's purse as a platform for the production of PHA bioplastics
.

From identifying and deploying new genetic traits, to evaluating the performance of these traits in field trials, to developing PHA bioplastics in seeds, to securing exclusive rights to omega-3 oil technology, the process is a long one
.
However, the first milestone was reached last year when the company announced that it had successfully completed field testing of prototype lines of canola shepherd's purse programmed to produce PHA bioplastics directly in seeds
.

PHA is a natural polymer that is ubiquitous in nature and fully biodegradable in the environment
.
They are currently produced by fermentation of engineered microorganisms
.
Yield10 believes that producing PHA directly in seeds as a by-product of oil and protein meal has the potential to enable PHA bioplastics to be produced on an agricultural scale at the same cost as commercial vegetable oils, thereby driving mass adoption in the plastics market
.
The two prototype plants tested in these studies (C3014 and C3015) were microbially genetically programmed under a patent for a new technology developed by Yield10 researchers to produce shepherd's purse seeds containing high levels of PHA bioplastic suitable for field production
.
The results showed that the C3015 line produced a level of 6% PHA as a percentage of seed weight, consistent with the results observed in the field trials conducted in 2020
.

Completion of these results prompted the company's decision to begin expanding the seed size of the PHA spring shepherd's purse prototype line in acres in 2022
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Yield10 is also developing PHA winter shepherd's purse lines and advancing its research program to increase the level and type of PHA production achievable in its shepherd's purse plant varieties
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The first field plantings of these lines are planned for winter 2022/2023
.

Dr.
Kristi Snell, Chief Scientific Officer of Yield10 Biosciences, said: "Camelina, as a platform crop, has great potential for efficient, scalable, low-cost production of PHA bioplastics
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Through the R&D work to date, Yield10 is expected to provide global Making a significant contribution to the production of biodegradable materials for consumer packaging and food service projects, while also helping to reduce the amount of petroleum-based plastic waste currently polluting the world's land and oceans
.
The company's pace of innovation in the development of camelina PHA traits, And the eventual commercial deployment of a year-round harvest on the spring and winter lines, there is real momentum
.
"

Yield10 plans to develop the optimized PHA trait into the herbicide- and disease-resistant shepherd's purse it is currently developing, with the aim of increasing the PHA content in the seeds to 10-20%
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In addition, work is currently underway to create a PHA pathway to enable the production of PHA copolymers in shepherd's purse
.

According to Yield10, the production of PHA bioplastics in shepherd's purse could be a whole new market opportunity for farmers
.
This opportunity could provide farmers with an economic return to justify large-scale adoption of shepherd's purse as a cover crop and the ability to produce the product at low cost for new markets
.