Researchers from the Institute of Research and Development of Chemical Processes (IIDEPROQ) at the Faculty of Engineering of the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés report a promising advance in the field of biotechnology with the production of bioplastics such as poly(3-hydroxybutyrate) (PHB), a biodegradable polymer, from hydrolysates of residual quinoa stems (Chenopodium quinoa Willd), that is, from renewable biological sources. This innovative research addresses the growing concern over the accumulation of plastics derived from fossil fuels, whose global production exceeds 390 million tons annually; therefore, the production of biologically sourced plastics is urgent.
In the research "Production and characterization of poly(3-hydroxybutyrate) from Halomonas boliviensis LC1 cultivated in hydrolysates of quinoa stems," Cristian Carrasco Villanueva and Diego Miranda —a doctoral student in the "Biorefinery and Agroindustrial Biotechnology" subprogram of the UMSA/Asdi Program in the Department of Chemistry at Umeå University in Sweden— both from IIDEPROQ at UMSA, participate alongside scientists from Sweden and Norway. The international research team reports for the first time the production of PHB through the cultivation of H. boliviensis in cellulosic hydrolysates of quinoa stems. An exhaustive characterization of the PHB produced from hydrolysates and synthetic media was carried out using advanced analytical techniques such as 1H nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, high-performance size exclusion chromatography (HPSEC), X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA)..