Rachel Rovinsky, a graduate student in the Department of Bacteriology, received USDA-NIFA funding for her project Investigating secondary stressors in PHA production and increasing variety of PHA produced from dairy and paper
waste through NIFA’s Predoctoral Fellowships Program. Rovinsky was among 49 predoctoral scholars who shared $7.4M in funding to help them prepare for careers in the research, education, and/or Extension fields within the food and agricultural sciences in the private sector, government, or academia.

Project summary (from USDA-NIFA site): Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs), a type of polyester synthesized by various bacteria and archaea under nutrient-limited or other stressful conditions, offer a promising biodegradable alternative to conventional plastics. However, their production costs remain too high to compete with petrochemical-based plastics. Increasing both the types of PHAs produced and strategies for increasing PHA yield will help lower this cost. Producing more versatile PHA co-polymers, such as polyhydroxybutyrate-co-polylactic acid (PHB-co-PLA), will contribute to lowering cost as copolymers are more flexible and therefore expand the applications of PHAs currently. For increasing PHA production yield, investigating how PHA contributes to stress tolerance in bacteria can lead to improved strategies for cultivation of PHA-producing strains. Given that pilot-scale microbial community production of PHAs has only been done with wastewater inocula, these new strategies can enable us to use more microbial community sources, such as landfills, in order to utilize waste feedstocks, such as dairy waste, and non-recyclable paper waste. This research will help contribute to building a circular bioeconomy, in which agricultural and forestry waste can be upcycled into a biodegradable product.