Common Bacteria Can Turn Plastic Bottles into the Painkiller Acetaminophen/Paracetamol

Common Bacteria Can Turn Plastic Bottles into the Painkiller Acetaminophen/Paracetamol

Common Bacteria Can Turn Plastic Bottles into the Painkiller Acetaminophen/Paracetamol Biologist Stephen Wallace – credit Edinburgh Innovations Scientists in Scotland recently engineered bacteria to be able to turn plastic into a precursor to the painkiller acetaminophen, also known as paracetamol. Though far from scalable at the moment, the reaction nevertheless underpins a potential starting point for greener production and recycling systems, as acetaminophen is produced with fossil fuels, and plastic pollutes the environment. The precursor compound, known as para-aminobenzoic acid (PABA), can be made endogenously by  Escherichia coli bacteria, and so those used in the study had this ability removed through genetic engineering. In this way, the bacteria needed to perform a Lossen rearrangement—or the process by which a nitrogen bearing molecule from the environment is converted to PABA, which is also the precursor to the vitamin B9, or folic acid. The molecule selected was polyethylene ter…