Recent Strategies for the Development of Biosourced-Monomers, Oligomers and Polymers-Based Materials: A Review with an Innovation and a Bigger Data Focus

Abstract

After setting the ground of the quantum innovation potential of biosourced entities and outlining the inventive spectrum of adjacent technologies that can derive from those, the current review highlights, with the support of Bigger Data approaches, and a fairly large number of articles, more than 250 and 10,000 patents, the following. It covers an overview of biosourced chemicals and materials, mainly biomonomers, biooligomers and biopolymers; these are produced today in a way that allows reducing the fossil resources depletion and dependency, and obtaining environmentally-friendlier goods in a leaner energy consuming society. A process with a realistic productivity is underlined thanks to the implementation of recent and specifically effective processes where engineered microorganisms are capable to convert natural non-fossil goods, at industrial scale, into fuels and useful high-value chemicals in good yield. Those processes, further detailed, integrate: metabolic engineering involving 1) system biology, 2) synthetic biology and 3) evolutionary engineering. They enable acceptable production yield and productivity, meet the targeted chemical profiles, minimize the consumption of inputs, reduce the production of by-products and further diminish the overall operation costs. As generally admitted the properties of most natural occurring biopolymers (e.g., starch, poly (lactic acid), PHAs.) are often inferior to those of the polymers derived from petroleum; blends and composites, exhibiting improved properties, are now successfully produced. Specific attention is paid to these aspects. Then further evidence is provided to support the important potential and role of products deriving from the biomass in general. The need to enter into the era of Bigger Data, to grow and increase the awareness and multidimensional role and opportunity of biosourcing serves as a conclusion and future prospects. Although providing a large reference database, this review is largely initiatory, therefore not mimicking previous classic reviews but putting them in a multiplying synergistic prospective.