Skip to main content

LUP Student Papers

LUND UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES

Exploring the Efficacy of tpiA as an Antibiotic Free Plasmid Maintenance Mechanism in Pseudomonas putida

Clark, Patrick (2025) MOBN02 20242
Degree Projects in Molecular Biology
Popular Abstract
Bacteria: Building the Future from Thin Air

Imagine what would happen if you could make nylon and other things that are needed to create everything from clothes to plastic containers with the use of microorganisms. It may seem far-fetched, but it’s getting closer to becoming reality. All you would need to get started is to help a few species of very special bacteria get even better at something that they already do naturally. One such species is Pseudomonas putida, which is a bacterium previously found to be effective in converting various waste material into a wide variety of new chemical building blocks such as those used to produce Nylon. If you could make P. putida more efficient at doing this by introducing genes from another... (More)
Bacteria: Building the Future from Thin Air

Imagine what would happen if you could make nylon and other things that are needed to create everything from clothes to plastic containers with the use of microorganisms. It may seem far-fetched, but it’s getting closer to becoming reality. All you would need to get started is to help a few species of very special bacteria get even better at something that they already do naturally. One such species is Pseudomonas putida, which is a bacterium previously found to be effective in converting various waste material into a wide variety of new chemical building blocks such as those used to produce Nylon. If you could make P. putida more efficient at doing this by introducing genes from another species of bacteria that’s good at making things that we need, you could do some amazing things! In a roundabout way, that’s what we are doing today will help to make happen in the future. We can put genes inside P. putida that will help it make these things but we also have to find a way to make sure that those genes stay where we put them so that the bacterium will be able to make the things that we need. Over time, it will lose those genes if we don’t intervene, and it won’t be able to make what we want it to. Normally, the way to do this is to add genes to them that make them able to survive antibiotics and connect them to the genes that allow them to make the things that we want, but this can cause problems for other bacteria, and antibiotics can be expensive and dangerous if used too often. A better way is to take a gene away from P. putida that they need and then give it back on a plasmid that connects it to genes that will allow it to make the things that we want. That will cause the genes that we want them to have to stay put, and once we can make this happen, creating things like bionylon from waste is one step closer to reality!

Master’s Degree Project in Molecular Biology, 45 credits, 2025
Department of Biology, Lund University

Advisors: Magnus Carlquist and Fredrik Lund
Division of Biotechnology and Applied Microbiology, Department of Process and Life Science Engineering (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
author
Clark, Patrick
supervisor
organization
course
MOBN02 20242
year
type
H2 - Master's Degree (Two Years)
subject
language
English
id
9213478
date added to LUP
2025-10-02 15:52:43
date last changed
2025-10-02 15:52:43
@misc{9213478,
  author       = {{Clark, Patrick}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  note         = {{Student Paper}},
  title        = {{Exploring the Efficacy of tpiA as an Antibiotic Free Plasmid Maintenance Mechanism in Pseudomonas putida}},
  year         = {{2025}},
}