More than a decade of work on the development of plant-based PHA is starting to bear fruit. Agricultural bioscience company Yield10 Bioscience, headquartered in Woburn, Massachusetts, has now announced recent advances in the development of Camelina as a platform for the production of PHA bioplastic.
The journey to identify and deploy new gene traits, evaluate the performance of these traits in field tests, develop PHA bioplastics in seed as well as to secure exclusive rights to omega-3 oils technology, has been a long one. Last year, however, a first milestone was reached when the company announced it had successfully completed field testing of prototype lines of the oilseed Camelina sativa that were programmed to produce PHA bioplastics directly in seed.
PHA are natural polymers, prevalent in nature and fully biodegradable in the environment. They are currently produced by fermentation of engineered microbes. Yield10 believes that direct production of PHA in seed as a co-product with oil and protein meal has the potential to enable production of PHA bioplastics on an agricultural scale at costs in line with commodity vegetable oils to drive large-scale adoption in the plastics markets. The two prototype plants (C3014 and C3015) tested in these studies were programmed with microbial genes based on a patent filed for new technology developed by Yield10 researchers to produce Camelina seed containing high levels of PHA bioplastic suitable for field production. Results showed that C3015 lines produced PHA at the 6 percent level as measured as a percent of seed weight, consistent with results observed in field tests conducted in 2020.
These results completed prompted the company’s decision to begin seed scale up of prototype PHA spring Camelina lines at acre-scale in 2022. Yield10 is also developing PHA winter Camelina lines and advancing its research programme to increase the level and type of PHA production achievable in its Camelina plant varieties. The first field planting of these lines is planned for winter 2022/2023.
“Camelina holds great promise as a platform crop for efficient, scalable, low-cost production of PHA bioplastics,” said Kristi Snell, Ph.D., Chief Science Officer of Yield10 Bioscience. “Through our research and development efforts to date, Yield10 expects to contribute significantly towards the global effort to produce biodegradable materials targeted for consumer packaging and food service items while also helping to reduce the amount of petroleum-based plastic waste currently polluting the world’s land and oceans. There is real momentum driving the company’s innovative pace of Camelina PHA trait development and its ultimate commercial deployment for year-round harvest using both spring and winter lines.”
Yield10 plans to breed an optimised PHA trait into the herbicide and disease resistant varieties of Camelina currently in its pipeline, with the aim of improving the level of PHA in the seed to 10-20 percent. In addition, work is underway to create PHA pathways that enable the production of PHA co-polymers in Camelina.
According to Yield10, the production of PHA bioplastics in Camelina could represent an entirely new market opportunity for farmers. This opportunity could provide economic returns for farmers to justify large acreage adoption of Camelina as a cover crop and enable the low-cost production of this product for new markets.