While on space trips, the crew has to make use of whatever limited resources and tools they have on board to pull through. But the International Space Station is always on the lookout for a better method to create plastic and a team of researchers from Brown and Stanford Universities, under direction from the NASA Ames Research Center have come up with a new technique involving genetically engineered E. coli to make flat, space-efficient sheets of plastic that can be folded into tools.

For selection of the best suited plastic, plastic food utensils were heated under heat lamps and after testing their chemical makeup, polystyrene emerged victorious in terms of folding, and the polymer P(3HB) was desirable because it is biodegradable. After the E. coli was successfully engineered, to produce the required enzymes and proteins for making the plastic sheets, they came up with two different ways to fold it.

One way was to draw in draw lines in a spot, and as black absorbs heat more quickly, when the plastic was put under infrared light, that area ended up melting more quickly. Bacillus spores, which expand and contract in different humidity levels, were placed strategically on the parts to be folded.

Small achievements like a few simple origami tools—a box and a cup have been constructed, but this could also be used for constructing large-scale foldable structures like telescope mirrors and solar panels.

Further challenges that the researchers realise are the perils of releasing bacteria into the sterilised environment. They realize how necessary bacteria like E. coli will be, both for materials like these and for human health (to make our food and populate our varying microbiomes), but studies have shown that bacteria can react unpredictably in space, and an outbreak is the last thing we need.

Thus, this issue of microbial behaviour has to be looked into before real-life applications.

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Author:Technology Blog