Chloroplast-Derived Liquid Crystal Polymers

Genetic engineering of plant chloroplasts allows the use of transgenic crops to synthesize novel polymers with useful material properties. Lifeasible has successfully developed a variety of reliable and economical solutions for chloroplast engineering in biomaterials. Our engineers focus on developing polymers with liquid crystal properties using chloroplast transformation methods for actuators and sensors.

Introduction

Liquid crystal polymers (LCPs) are a special class of thermoplastics that exhibit properties between highly ordered solid-state crystalline materials and amorphous disordered liquids over a well-defined temperature range. LCP has excellent mechanical properties at high temperature, excellent chemical resistance, low extractables and biocompatibility. The low viscosity in the melt makes it a very attractive material for thin wall applications and parts. Furthermore, their flame retardancy and dielectric properties make them excellent candidates for electrical and electronic applications. To date, thousands of LCPs have been synthesized. Para-hydroxybenzoic acid (pHBA) is the main monomer in liquid crystal polymers and is commonly produced by all plants, which has aroused great interest among scientists.

Fig. 1. Design and applications of liquid-crystalline polymers. (Kato T, et al., 2018)

Solutions

The use of plants as a production platform for pHBA through metabolic engineering of the chloroplast genome is an attractive alternative to petrochemical synthesis. We have successfully applied chloroplast transformation technology to the development of liquid crystal polymers. Lifeasible is committed to the synthesis of parabens using metabolic engineering of the chloroplast genome of the E. coli ubiC gene. We employed multiple strategies to increase pHBA levels in transgenic plants.

• Enhancement of pHBA levels in tobacco by chorismate pyruvate lyase (CPL).
• Enhancement of pHBA levels in tobacco by the 4-hydroxycinnamoyl-CoA hydratase/lyase (HCHL) of Pseudomonas fluorescens.
• Enhancement of pHBA levels in tobacco via transit peptides and breakable bonds.

Our goal is to engineer liquid crystal polymers using chloroplast transformation for metabolic engineering to generate plants capable of accumulating large quantities of the commercially important small aromatic compound pHBA. The flow of our solution is as follows:

Fig. 2. The flow of chloroplast-derived liquid crystal polymers solutions.

Attractive Advantages of Our Solutions

• Production of pHBA in plants can achieve product accumulation levels that are 10 to 20 times higher than commercially viable routes.
• Stable integration of the unmodified E. coli ubiC gene into the tobacco chloroplast genome.
• Compared to CPL-mediated pHBA production in nuclear transformed plants, our solution can bypass the limitation of achieving sufficiently high levels of enzymatic activity in the chloroplast compartment.
• Production of pHBA by plastid genetic engineering is an environmentally sustainable process with low reliance on non-renewable resources.
• Using plants to produce this compound could reduce the cost of manufacturing LCPs and enable them to expand into other fields.

Lifeasible is committed to providing customers around the world with fully customized chloroplast engineered solutions for liquid crystal polymers. Please contact us to discuss further details to ensure your next success.

References

1. Kato T, Uchida J, Ichikawa T, et al. (2018) Functional liquid-crystalline polymers and supramolecular liquid crystals[J]. Polymer Journal. 50(1): 149-166.
2. Viitanen PV, Devine AL, et al. (2004) Metabolic engineering of the chloroplast genome using the Echerichia coli ubiC gene reveals that chorismate is a readily abundant plant precursor for p-hydroxybenzoic acid biosynthesis. Plant Physiol. 136(4):4048-4060.