Team:TU Darmstadt

combimer

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  • Glycolic Acid Production in E. coli
  • Glycolic Acid Production in S. cerevisiae
  • Caprolactone Production in E. coli
  • Polymers
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  • PLGA
  • PLGC
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Dependence on petrochemicals derived from oil and gas poses a major problem in the plastics industry and polymer production. Establishing biological precursors for high quality polymers is a hurdle we want to tackle.

We were driven by the idea of constructing an eco-friendly polymer usable for human medical applications. During our research, we stumbled upon PLGA (Poly(lactic-co-glycolic-acid)) and PLGC (Poly(lactide-co-glycolide-co-caprolactone)). In our case, they consist of renewable resources (glycolic acid, ε-caprolactone and lactic acid) and degrade after a controllable period of time into non-toxic compounds, which pose no further danger to the environment, as well as the human body. For more background information visit our subpage.