Companies: Particle Measuring Systems
Typical virus inactivation methods include low pH treatment (e.g., below pH 4.5, below 4.0 or even below 3.8, heat treatment, treatment with surfactants and radiation (e.g., ultraviolet light exposure).
Air Filters/cleaners: Ultravation (has an interesting set of products which uses activated carbon and UV to sanitize the air).
Oxidation: is used in industry with the production of cleaning products. Substances which have the ability to oxidize other substances are known as oxidative or referred to as oxidizing agents, oxidizers and oxidants. Oxidants remove electrons from other substances. Thus oxidants are themeselves reduced. Examples of oxidants include H2O2, CrO3 and have high oxidation numbers. They are highly electronegative that can gain one or two extra electrons by oxidizing a substance. For more information on oxidation click here.
UV Products: Xenex (pulsed UV disinfection robots) UVivatec (Bayer)
Biosurfactants: are naturally occurring amphiphiles that are being actively pursued as alternative to syntehtic surfactants in cleaning, personal care, and cosmetic products. On the basis of their ability to mobilize and disperse hydrocarbons, biosurfactants are also involved in the bioremediation of oil spills. (Tsianou, “Rhamnolipid Micellizaiton and Adsorption Properites” Int J Mol Sci, 2022).
–Rhamnolipids: are LMW glycolipid biosurfactants that consist of a mono or di-rhamnose head group and a hydrocarbon fatty acid chain.
Bioremediation:
Plastics
Although plastics have been an economic boon, particularly in packaging and construction applications, their use has produced unsustainable levels of waste. From 1950 to 2015, about 4900 megatons, accounting for 59% of all plastics ever produced, have been discarded into landfills and the environment. Ninety percent of plastics produced—consisting of polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP), polyvinyl chloride (PVC), polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polyurethane (PU) and polystyrene (PS) are projected to persist for hundreds of years; they are not biodegradable on timescales relative to their end of use. Consequently, their bioaccumulation poses threats to ecosystems and, potentially, to human health.
Although PE, PP, PVC, PET, PU and PS are referred to as non-biodegradable, some microbes and insects have ways to metabolise these plastics into their constituent molecules. Among the most produced plastics, PET is a hydrolysable polymer that is widely used in the packaging and textile industries. Compared to other common plastics, PET is more amenable to biodegradation due to the presence of hydrolysable ester bonds. Substantial progress has been made in enzymatic PET depolymerisation for resource recovery. For example, PET hydrolase (PETase) from Ideonella sakaiensis has been subject to numerous protein engineering efforts that have resulted in PETase variants with depolymerisation rates orders of magnitude higher than the wild-type enzyme, and with greater thermoand chemostability.
Microbial communities could be supplemented with engineered bacteria that secrete plastic-degrading enzymes (i.e., cell bioaugmentation); this can be more cost-effective than continuously supplementing a cocktail of purified enzymes into a secondary treatment unit. A major challenge with the cell bioaugmentation approach is persistence of the introduced microorganisms, which are often not adapted to the environment at hand and are therefore likely to be quickly eliminated.
As an alternative strategy that would bypass these barriers to establishment, genetically engineering microbes native to the environment to express metabolic pathways for biodegradation of plastic waste. This approach, known as genetic bioaugmentation, can be achieved through in situ delivery of broad-host-range conjugative plasmids. Genetically engineered bacteria in a municipal wastewater sample to degrade PET plastics by delivering a broad-host-range, conjugating plasmid carrying the FAST-PETase gene, which codes for an engineered PET hydrolase that is more robust to pH and temperature ranges and is orders of magnitude more efficient than the wild-type enzyme. See Ingalls