Team:Stanford-Brown/Plastic
Plastic Folding
Testing and Applications
Why plastics?
Plastic is an extremely versatile material that can be used in a multitude of applications such as in medical devices, construction, prototyping, and much more. Currently, many common plastics require the use of petrochemicals to manufacture. To utilize the benefits and versatility of plastics in long term space travel and space colonies would require the importation of petrochemicals into space. With the limited volume and mass payloads of space travel, our team wanted to try to find an alternative to shipping petrochemicals into space.
Our team looked to synthetic biology to find a solution to the manufacture of plastics in space to minimize the use of petrochemicals. This summer we wanted to engineer E. Coli to produce two kinds of plastic: Polystyrene and P(3HB).