The specialty chemicals company Evonik opened a new production site for its Evonik Advanced Botanicals subsidiary in Tours, France. Evonik is active in over 100 countries and the subsidiary was originally founded in 2016, when Evonik acquired the French startup Alkion Biopharma SAS, an expert in biotechnological production of plant-based active ingredients.
Many animals provide ingenious inspirations for new materials and their production. Spiders, for instance, produce silk that withstands enormous forces and which has since been artificially generated in a laboratory setting. Similarly, mussels secrete byssus threads that can attach strongly to any material underwater – a long sought-after property. Velvet worms, small animals somewhere between an earthworm and a caterpillar, are equipped with an equally unique material: a sticky liquid that wards off enemies or catches prey.
Mosses are the second largest group of land plants today, and arguably the oldest. For millions of years, these plants have been producing highly complex molecules out of simple chemical building blocks, in a sustainable, efficient and cheap manner. Many of these chemical substances are used in medicine and the perfume industry today.
Air pollution is most commonly associated with traffic and car emissions. However, there are a number of other sources for pollution, such as agricultural emissions due to fertiliser use. According to researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, reducing ammonia (NH3) emissions by 50% could avoid the deaths of more than 250,000 people each year that are caused by air pollution worldwide.
Clariant, a specialty chemicals company based in Switzerland and with a demonstration plant in Straubing, Germany, will invest in a new full-scale commercial biorefinery for the production of cellulosic ethanol from agricultural residues using its sunliquid® technology. The new plant, with an annual production capacity of 50.000 tons, will be built in the south-western part of Romania.
Mussels produce and use one of the strongest biobased adhesives known to date, because they live in the tidal and shelf areas of the oceans and must therefore withstand strong currents and salt water. Exactly such a strong and biobased super glue would also be very useful in regenerative medicine: biocompatible adhesives could be used to treat superficial wounds, and could replace plates and screws, which are commonly used to treat bone fractures.
Many animals are herbivores. However, the plant cell wall contains cellulose and pectin – both of which are very difficult to digest and require specific enzymes for their break down. Throughout evolution many symbioses between microbes and herbivores have emerged in order to derive the most use out of their vegetable nourishment. The thistle tortoise beetles are an extraordinary example for such a symbiosis.
Microbes often live in complex biosystems. Their co-habitation is regulated by a number of chemical signals. Researchers from Jena now identified the mechanism that causes Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, roughly ten micrometer in size, to lose their flagella within minutes of coming close to Pseudomonas protegens bacteria, which are merely two micrometers in size.
Climate change and global warming causes more than rising sea levels. It also causes an increasing acidification of the oceans. This, however, affects especially those sea creatures with a calcareous shell – including mussels, which live in tidal regions of the coastal zones.
Biorefineries turn biomass into useful chemicals or raw material that can be processed into bio-based products. But where are they located? And what type of biomass are they using? To answer these questions the Cologne-based nova-Institute conducted a comprehensive survey of all European biorefineries over the summer of 2017.