Enzymatic Polymerization Routes to Synthetic–Natural Materials: A Review

• Published in: ACS sustainable chemistry & engineering Vol. 8; no. 27; pp. 9947 - 9954
• Main Authors: Behabtu, Natnael, Kralj, Slavko
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: American Chemical Society 13.07.2020
• Subjects: Polysaccharide applications; Sustainable materials; Polysaccharide synthesis; alpha-1,3-Glucan; Colloidal polysaccharides
• ISSN: 2168-0485; 2168-0485
• DOI: 10.1021/acssuschemeng.0c01664

Sustainability is becoming a key driver for product differentiation, and corporations around the world are setting specific sustainability metrics on new products. Greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), land and water use, renewable feedstocks, and product end-of-life are thus becoming the metrics to assess products for environmental and societal impact. Within this framework, current commercial polymeric materials are showing their limitations and warranting the need for novel material development. A new emphasis on natural materials with the design flexibility of synthetic material is emerging to address these needs. Polysaccharides are a class of natural polymers that need a renewed focus given their large design space and rich functionality combined with intrinsic sustainability. Yet, being mostly extracted from natural feedstock, current industrial polysaccharides such as cellulose and starch lack the purity and molecular design precision found in synthetic polymers. Enzymatic polymerization of polysaccharides is one technology that can address some of the current limitations, allowing synthetic polymerization approaches. This technology enables both the synthesis of known polysaccharides with a higher purity and polymer structure precision as well as the synthesis of hard to extract polysaccharides such as alpha-1,3-glucans. Moreover, the bottom-up assembly of insoluble polysaccharide polymers from soluble monomers allows the design of novel and rich colloidal features which, in turn, enable many industrial applications. Thus, enzymatic polymerization offers the potential to meet the purity and control offered by synthetic polymeric materials while meeting, by design, the ever more stringent end-of-life requirements.