We are experiencing minor difficulties with our submission forms, which we are working to resolve. If you have any issues while submitting items, please contact us at dspace-lib@mit.edu.

High-throughput experimentation for discovery of biodegradable polyesters

Thumbnail Image
Download
Name

fransen-et-al-2023-high-throughput-experimentation-for-discovery-of-biodegradable-polyesters.pdf

Description
Published version
Size

1.22 MB

Format

Adobe PDF

Checksum (MD5)

8f161ce420886f419d54ff0e5460e9bb

Thumbnail Image
Download
Name

2024-correction-for-fransen-et-al-high-throughput-experimentation-for-discovery-of-biodegradable-polyesters.pdf

Description
Correction
Size

65.09 KB

Format

Adobe PDF

Checksum (MD5)

03ff3d4dcfdb02912321ac5aefdbda09

sword-2025-11-17T21:54:53.original.xml (130 B)
Original SWORD entry document
Author(s)
Fransen, Katharina A
•
Av-Ron, Sarah HM
•
Buchanan, Tess R
•
Walsh, Dylan J
•
Rota, Dechen T
•
Van Note, Lana
•
Olsen, Bradley D
Date Issued
May 30, 2023
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Publisher
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Citation
K.A. Fransen,S.H.M. Av-Ron,T.R. Buchanan,D.J. Walsh,D.T. Rota,L. Van Note, & B.D. Olsen, High-throughput experimentation for discovery of biodegradable polyesters, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 120 (23) e2220021120.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
The consistent rise of plastic pollution has stimulated interest in the development of biodegradable plastics. However, the study of polymer biodegradation has historically been limited to a small number of polymers due to costly and slow standard methods for measuring degradation, slowing new material innovation. High-throughput polymer synthesis and a high-throughput polymer biodegradation method are developed and applied to generate a biodegradation dataset for 642 chemically distinct polyesters and polycarbonates. The biodegradation assay was based on the clear-zone technique, using automation to optically observe the degradation of suspended polymer particles under the action of a single
Pseudomonas lemoignei bacterial colony. Biodegradability was found to depend strongly on aliphatic repeat unit length, with chains less than 15 carbons and short side chains improving biodegradability. Aromatic backbone groups were generally detrimental to biodegradability; however, ortho- and para-substituted benzene rings in the backbone were more likely to be degradable than metasubstituted rings. Additionally, backbone ether groups improved biodegradability. While other heteroatoms did not show a clear improvement in biodegradability, they did demonstrate increases in biodegradation rates. Machine learning (ML) models were leveraged to predict biodegradability on this large dataset with accuracies over 82% using only chemical structure descriptors.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Chemical Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2220021120
PrivacyPermissionsAccessibilityContact us
Notify us about copyright concerns.