DNA Plastics: Recyclable, Biodegradable Revolution!

400 million tonnes. That’s the amount of plastic we create each year, with lots of negative consequences! Will DNA be part of the solution? Read up to find out!

DNA Goes Plastic

Is there anything more common than plastics?

The numbers are hard to believe. Globally, we make over 400 million tonnes every single year! And plastics are amazing materials. Lightweight, cheap, versatile, they can be used for years or just once (for example, in medical devices). Thanks to their low density, they can even make transportation more efficient and green.

Unfortunately, they also have darker sides. Lots of single-use plastic is used recklessly, and with recycling rates under 10%, it ends up in landfills or is burned. Oh, and the production of plastics is expected to double by 2050!

The environmental consequences are too many to list here (but you can go on Wikipedia), but three stand out:

• Greenhouse gas emissions: Most plastics come from oil, with all the problems related to that

• Pollution: Walk on a beach, and you come back with 100 little pieces of plastic trash.

• Microplastics: Plastics don’t disappear; they fragment into micro-scale pieces that enter the food chain and have been linked to health issues.

So, lots of problems. Which is a pity, for such wonderful materials!

Bioplastics: the Dream?

Addressing all these problems is complicated. Bio-plastics are one solution. These materials are derived from renewable biomass instead of non-renewable oil. There is a huge variety of bio-plastics, all with different characteristics. Some are recyclable, some are biodegradable, and sometimes they are even blended with traditional plastics! Just to make things more complicated.

And while they are an improvement, they still have problems:

• The synthesis requires energy-intensive and harsh conditions, with toxic solvents

• The recycling or degradation is an issue, because they require new chemistry

If only a biocompatible, biodegradable, and designable material were there to help us…

DNA to the Rescue

Today’s paper is one of the most out-there we've covered. And that’s great!

The authors introduce a new bio-plastic with two components: DNA (from biomass) and dextran (a polysaccharide, basically chains of sugars). This new material is water-processable, recyclable, and biodegradable.

But why DNA?

Well, it’s biocompatible, biodegradable, and versatile. And there is also a lot of it! The global DNA biomass is estimated at 50 billion tonnes: crazy! And using less than 1% would cover the need for raw materials for worldwide plastics manufacturing. And it’s renewable, of course.

So, the idea is to use DNA and dextran to create 3D hydrogels that can be shaped into plastic-like materials.

How to Make DNA Plastics

The production process is divided into 3 steps:

1. Oxidation of polysaccharides:
   The plant-derived dextran is oxidized using the Malaprade oxidation, creating reactive aldehydes. The reagents used in this step make it the least sustainable part of the process.

2. Hydrogel formation:
   The oxidized polysaccharides are added to a DNA solution, and the aldehydes react with the imine in the DNA to form a hydrogel! All these steps are performed in water, at room temperature, without inert gas or toxic solvents. A huge environmental improvement!

3. Shaping and drying:
   The hydrogel is then molded. It can either be freeze-dried (at -20°C or -196°C in liquid nitrogen) to produce porous materials, or dried at room temperature to get denser ones.

And just like that, you can get DNA spoons, knives, and more!

Material Performances: Does it Work?

The authors characterized the material in depth.

• Mechanical Properties:
  The stiffness of the material depends strongly on formulation and drying:

  • Increasing dextran content raised the stiffness 36 to 91 MPa.

  • Room-temperature dense films reached 1155 MPa, while in the dried porous samples with the same formulation, it was reduced to 48 MPa, because of the microstructure.

  • These performances are comparable to common plastics like HDPE/LDPE!

• Chemical resistance: The bio-plastics resisted common solvents like chloroform or DMSO.

• Aqua-healing: If an object is broken, add water, dry it, and it’s as good as new! The pieces fuse back together without affecting mechanical strength. Water can also be used to assemble complex structures, like fluorescent flowers!

The authors also used the bioplastic to reproduce templates on different scales:

• Lotus-leaf textures: The surface features of the lotus leaf contribute to its ultrahydrophobicity, and the bioplastics could reproduce the features!

• Microneedle arrays: The authors created microneedle arrays with cones of around 300 µm, which worked in mice.

• Photonic nanopatterns: The bioplastic is compatible with nanoscale processability, and the authors created nanoscale patterns for photonics.

What About the Waste? Safety, Degradation, and Recycling

Safety and end-of-life are big issues for plastics, with microplastics being everywhere and only 10% of plastics being recycled.

The authors tested the biocompatibility of their new material:

• In vitro cell assay: The material showed no cytotoxicity in primary human fibroblasts.

• In vivo testing: Mice fed with the material showed no effects on weight loss or organs. Plus, no microplastics in the organs!

They also checked the biodegradation. In Singaporean soil, the bioplastic completely degraded after 29 days, and the biomaterial showed ~28% biodegradation after 45 days in lab tests. Plus, it’s DNA, so DNase accelerates the degradation, down to 10-20 minutes in concentrated solutions! This creates an interesting biodegradation mechanism, different from the usual polymer dissolution. Great for chemical recycling!

Talking about recycling, they actually emphasize 3 recycling loops:

1. Physical recycling (water-remolding / aqua-healing): solid bioplastic dissolves or swells in water to recover hydrogel and be remolded.

2. Chemical recycling: reversible imine bonds enable hydrolysis/debonding under mild conditions, allowing aqueous recovery of components.

3. Biodegradation/end-of-life loop: DNA + polysaccharide constituents are biodegradable by natural enzymes (DNases, polysaccharidases), giving an additional enzymatic degradation path not available to most synthetic plastics

Strengths, Weaknesses, and the Future

Funny idea! DNA- and polysaccharide-based plastics, water-processable and recyclable. It’s great to see progress in this area. This new material has some strengths:

• Water-based, ambient process, with no toxic solvents or high temperatures, reducing energy and environmental costs.

• Multi-closed-loop recyclability, combining physical remolding, chemical bonds, and biodegradability.

• Mechanical and optical tunability, controlled by composition and freeze/dry conditions.

A good start! But it’s still a material in research, so it has limitations. To be clear, these could be reduced with more work and time!

• High costs: At USD 3.1-5.2/g, it’s clearly not competing with plastic. But using cheaper raw materials and improving the process will help!

• Oxidation reagents cost and sustainability: Needs a cleaner and cheaper generation of oxidation reagents to improve the sustainability profile.

• Moisture sensitivity: The material is susceptible to humidity and water.

• Environmental benefits depend on recycling: Today, the material is more sustainable than classic plastic only if recycled 10 times.

But this doesn’t make it less exciting! So, go and read the article here. Creating plastics from DNA is a recent and rapidly advancing area of research, and it’s cool to see where it goes from here!

If you made it this far, thank you! Do you work on something similar? Do you have ideas on this new material? Reply and let me know!

More Room:

• Tagging Safe DNA: DNA-based computing is going places, but still has some kinks to iron out. This review evaluates DNA-based authentication and data storage technologies, highlighting their distinct challenges. DNA tagging is limited by high costs and slow verification, making it suitable only for high-security, low-volume uses. Isothermal amplification with colorimetric detection shows promise for authentication, while Illumina sequencing leads in data storage. However, lack of standardization hinders widespread adoption, and success will require application-specific optimization and using DNA as a secondary authentication layer

• Targeting Organelles with DNA: Be it the mitochondria, the Golgi, or the nucleus, there is DNA for it. This review highlights the potential of DNA-based nanomachines as intelligent drug carriers for organelle-targeted cancer therapy. These nanomachines can precisely deliver drugs or directly attack subcellular structures, enhancing efficacy, reducing side effects, overcoming multidrug resistance, and improving therapeutic durability. The paper discusses design principles, targeting strategies for different organelles, and the role of AI-driven self-driving labs in accelerating research. It also outlines current challenges and future directions for advancing organelle-targeted cancer treatments.

• DNA Nanotech Vs EVs: No, not electric vehicles, we’re talking about extracellular vesicles. A DNA nanotechnology-engineered hydrogel biosensor enables rapid and accurate detection of cancer-associated EVs for liquid biopsy. By integrating EV capture, enrichment, and detection in one platform, it uses aptamer-based recognition of miRNA-21 and EpCAM to generate multiplexed fluorescence signals. This dual-marker strategy achieves near-perfect correlation with gold-standard methods and 100% accuracy in distinguishing breast cancer patients from healthy donors, offering a scalable and ultrasensitive tool for early cancer diagnosis.

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