White biotechnology

For tens of thousands of years, humans relied on nature to provide them with all the things they needed to make themselves more comfortable. They wove clothes and fabrics from wool, cotton or silk, and dyed them with colours derived from plants and animals. Trees provided the material to build houses, furniture and fittings. But this all changed during the first half of the twentieth century, when organic chemistry developed methods to create many of these products from oil. Oil‐derived synthetic polymers, coloured with artificial dyes, soon replaced natural fibres in clothes and fabrics. Plastics rapidly replaced wood and metals in many consumer items, buildings and furniture. However, biology may be about to take revenge on these synthetic, petroleum‐based consumer goods. Stricter environmental regulations and the growing mass of non‐degradable synthetics in land‐fills have made biodegradable products appealing again. Growing concerns about the dependence on imported oil, particularly in the USA, and the awareness that the world's oil supplies are not limitless are additional factors prompting the chemical and biotechnology industries to explore nature's richness in search of methods to replace petroleum‐based synthetics. An entire branch of biotechnology, known as ‘white biotechnology’, is devoted to this. It uses living cells—from yeast, moulds, bacteria and plants—and enzymes to synthesize products that are easily degradable, require less energy and create less waste during their production. This is not a recent development: in fact, biotechnology has been contributing to industrial processes for some time. For decades, bacterial enzymes have been used widely in food manufacturing and as active ingredients in washing powders to reduce the amount of artificial surfactants. Transgenic Escherichia coli are used to produce human insulin in large‐scale fermentation tanks. And the first rationally designed enzyme, used in detergents to break down fat, was introduced as early as 1988. The benefits …