Vanillin made of plastic

GM bacteria will be able to produce vanillin from plastic bottles

Sergey Vasiliev, Naked Science

Vanillin is isolated from the fruits of a tropical orchid. However, nature is not able to meet all the needs of humanity in this flavor, which in 2025 will reach 60 thousand tons. Most of the vanillin is produced by chemical synthesis from petroleum raw materials. Household waste can become a new source of this valuable substance. More precisely, polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is an extremely popular polymer that is used, for example, for the manufacture of plastic bottles.

Obtaining vanillin from PET became possible thanks to a new work by Joanna Sadler and Stephen Wallace from the University of Edinburgh, whose article was published in the journal Green Chemistry (Microbial synthesis of vanillin from waste poly(ethylene terephthalate)). The authors noticed that the monomer forming PET – terephthalic acid – is able to turn into vanillin through a chain of five chemical reactions.

All these reactions are used in different types of organisms, and scientists have isolated the genes of the corresponding enzymes, collected them into a single plasmid and introduced them into E.coli cells. Laboratory experiments conducted with GM bacteria have shown that they are capable of processing terephthalic acid, a decomposition product PET – in vanillin with high efficiency, up to 79 percent.

The authors are confident that if the new method reaches the stage of industrial technology, it will allow humanity to close the need for vanillin for a long time. At the same time, useful production contributes to solving the problem of waste recycling: today about 50 million tons of PET are sent to landfills every year.

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