Sustainable Bioplastic Made from Biomass DNA and Ionomers

Abstract

Plastics play important roles in modern life and currently the development of plastic recycling is highly demanding and challenging. To relieve this dilemma, one option is to develop new sustainable bioplastics that are compatible with the environment over the whole material life cycle. We report a sustainable bioplastic made from natural DNA and biomass-derived ionomers, termed as DNA plastics. The sustainability involves all aspects of the production, use, and end-of-life options of DNA plastics: (1) the raw materials are derived from biorenewable resources; (2) the water-processable strategy is environmentally friendly, not involving high-energy consumption, the use of organic solvents, and the production of byproducts; (3) recyclable and nondestructive use is achieved to significantly prolong the service lifetime of the plastics; and (4) the disposal of waste plastics follows two green routes including the recycling of waste plastics and enzyme-triggered controllable degradation under mild conditions. Besides, DNA plastics can be “aqua-welded” to form arbitrary designed products such as a plastic cup. This work provides a solution to transform biobased hydrogel to bioplastic and demonstrates the closed-loop recycling of DNA plastics, which will advance the development of sustainable materials.

DNA Hydrogels in the Perspective of Mechanical Properties

“…For example, using salmon sperm DNA to prepare hydrogels is a low‐cost method, but it is difficult to exploit the flexibility of DNA sequence. [ 123 ] We expect that this review will help to strengthen readers' understanding of DNA hydrogels from the perspective of mechanical properties, and provide some enlightenment and direction for future research. We believe that DNA hydrogels with the merit of low‐cost, controllable sequence, and tunable mechanical properties will be developed in the near future.…”

Hydrogen‐Bonding Affords Sustainable Plastics with Ultrahigh Robustness and Water‐Assisted Arbitrarily Shape Engineering

“…Notwithstanding, the proposal used an organic solvent in the initial step and lacked forming complex shapes. More recently, Yang et al [6] developed a bioplastic made from natural DNA and biomass-derived ionomers with water-processability, which, in some extent, suffers from poor mechanical strength. Therefore, constructing sustainable plastics with simultaneous arbitrary shapes and superior mechanical properties remains challenging.Supramolecular plastic-like hydrogels [7] (SPHs) are physically cross-linked networks containing large amounts of water and exhibit mechanical properties (such as yielding and forced elastic deformation) in analogous to plastics, which could be developed through delicately regulating the flexibility, molecular interactions, and hydrophilic/hydrophobic balance of polymer chains.…”

“…Notwithstanding, the proposal used an organic solvent in the initial step and lacked forming complex shapes. More recently, Yang et al [6] developed a bioplastic made from natural DNA and biomass-derived ionomers with water-processability, which, in some extent, suffers from poor mechanical strength. Therefore, constructing sustainable plastics with simultaneous arbitrary shapes and superior mechanical properties remains challenging.…”

Application of Nucleic Acid Frameworks in the Construction of Nanostructures and Cascade Biocatalysts: Recent Progress and Perspective

“…For broader practical and even industrial applications of the nucleic acid nanostructures, the techniques for massive and cost-effective production of DNA and RNA building blocks also need to be developed and optimized (Chandler et al, 2020;Geary et al, 2021). Recently, biomass DNA directly extracted from living organisms was successfully converted into biodegradable materials, ranging from gels to plastics, at large scales with very low costs Han et al, 2021). While these approaches demonstrated the feasibility of acquiring and applying massive amount of DNA raw materials from nature for the construction of functional materials, development of novel technologies for efficient synthesis of longer and more accurate oligonucleotides, such as enzymatic de novo synthesis technology, will facilitate the acquirement of more and better oligonucleotide sequences to be used as components for the construction of nucleic acid nanostructures in the future (Jensen and Davis, 2018;Perkel, 2019;Eisenstein, 2020).…”