Bioplastics,printable electronics and makerbots

[David Murphy]

Hi all

I've seen a few discussions on here about bioplastics/biofuels in the past and I'm also a fan of the home fabrication scene.

I've seen facinating news about bioplastics: http://www.planete-energies.com/content/features/plastics/bioplastics.html
I've heard interesting things about semiconducting plastics and printable electronics:http://blogs.dickinson.edu/mindmeetsmatter/2010/11/18/semiconducting-plastics/
I've seen news about some incredible developments in 3D printing: http://www.economist.com/node/18114327

I know building a makerbot which can build a makerbot is a fairly monumental challenge and devilishly complex, you still need to buy in some components and slot it together.

but

If they figure out the makerbots the only thing you would then need to buy in are the plastics.
Could the DIYbio crowd take it even further if they got to that point?

Might it ever be possible to sit a few tanks of GM algae in sunlight and use them to produce all the different types of plastic you might need to create electronics?
how might you purify such plastics?
what would you need to process them?

David

[Cathal Garvey]

Hey David!

Talk about a holy grail, huh? Free home manufacturing starting with just light, carbon and a bottle of wee. Or a complex mix of salts and phosphates, take your pick. :P

From my understanding, thermoplastics behave somewhat like gels, in that above a certain temperature they melt into constitutent molecules, but at lower temperatures they either re-polymerise or just form an organised matrix that gives them their firm properties. Therefore if all that is required is the creation of a single molecule of a certain form, there is no reason you couldn't get an alga to do the job for you. Processing and extraction could then be standardised to select for large plasticky molecules, it's likely the same procedure would do roughly well enough for most plastics.

So given a raw broth that you extract a few grams of plastic from per batch, you could collect enough to melt into a spool that'll give you makerbot/reprap style feedstock. Personally I think it's high time they developed a pellet-fed printer, but it's non-trivial. With a pellet-fed printer you could just refine, shred and pour the plastic into the printer.

So, in principal, you could do just that: grow, refine and print with your own plastics. I don't doubt it'll happen someday but it's impossible to predict when! A near-term homebrew thermoplastic would be possible now if there were one that you could use as-it-comes, but my understanding is that most "bioplastics" are actually chemically refined somewhat from natural precursors. Perhaps a natural wax could stand in for a bioplastic if you're willing to accept a lower melting point and a possibly brittler quality. But a collection of appropriate conducting, semiconducting and structural plastics that we can "brew" directly and extract at home will probably take a while.

I'd predict it as a mid-term landmark in synthetic biology, somewhere between the beginnings of genome engineering and the endpoint of "print me a horse".

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[David Murphy]

Oh I know it's a bit of a holy grail but I'm kinda interested how far along it's possible to go right now.

(the even more ambitious goal would be that plus being able to produce the chemicals needed for printable solar panels)

 

Have there been any projects, open, academic or commercial to engineer organisms to create some form of thermoplastics.

[Cathal Garvey]

I think there have been, but I don't recall any details beyond that.

Probably a better avenue than extracting solar panel semiconductors from GM microbes would be to create a strain of alga that directly channels photosynthetic electrons to an electrode. That way, you'd literally grow solar panels on waste metal scrap. It'd be a mashup of naturally occurring soil/mud bacteria that already produce tiny currents in this way, and high-output alga, whether naturally isolated or engineered.

I reckon it'd be possible to make a very basic natural mashup by carefully picking the bacterial species for the anaerobic electrode of a Microbial Fuel Cell to match an aerobic alga at the other electrode; there was an iGEM project that aimed to do just that, engineering the algae to release some of their hard-earned glucose into the shared medium to diffuse over to the bacteria. It didn't work in the end but it was an ambitious idea!

[Rikke Rasmussen]

Recently came across a company in Silicon Valley called Amyris, who screen for and produce different biochemicals, including bioplastics and biofuel. Don't know whether they're also actively engineering organisms for creation of known compounds, but I think their work might be worth looking at.

/Rikke

[Giovanni Lostumbo]

 Can bacteria harvest Aerogel? Maybe it would make it less expensive.
http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/03/05/2324221/Researchers-Develop-Super-Batteries-From-Aerogel
http://inhabitat.com/super-batteries-made-from-frozen-smoke-may-be-here-soon/
If bacteria could synthesize a lattice without needing the supercritical phase
transition from liquid to gas, that would be both good for batteries
and other applications. SEAgel is made from agar. Maybe the bacteria
could grow on the agar, but not consume it (using an alternative
nutrient source), though transport it into/around the cell and make a
"scaffold" lattice on the other end?