In a world overrun with plastic garbage, causing untold environmental woes, University of Houston assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, Maksud Rahman, has developed a way to turn bacterial cellulose—a biodegradable material—into a multifunctional material with the potential to replace plastic.
It has the potential to become your next disposable water bottle, and so much more, like packaging material or even wound dressings—all made from one of Earth's abundant and biodegradable biopolymers: bacterial cellulose. The paper is published in the journal Nature Communications.
"We envision these strong, multifunctional and eco-friendly bacterial cellulose sheets becoming ubiquitous, replacing plastics in various industries and helping mitigate environmental damage," said Rahman.
"We report a simple, single-step and scalable bottom-up strategy to biosynthesize robust bacterial cellulose sheets with aligned nanofibrils and bacterial cellulose-based multi-functional hybrid nanosheets using shear forces from fluid flow in a rotational culture device.
"The resulting bacterial cellulose sheets display high tensile strength flexibility, foldability, optical transparency, and long-term mechanical stability," said M.A.S.R. Saadi, a doctoral student at Rice University, who served as the study's first author. Shyam Bhakta, a postdoctoral fellow in Biosciences at Rice, supported the biological implementation.
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