bioMATADOR: biocompatible Material Agnostic Testbed for Autonomous Degradation of Recalcitrants

Author(s):

Patrick B. Kruk, Jose A. Wippold, Sunny Karnani, and Joseph M. Pennington IV

Abstract:

Plastic polymers are ubiquitous in both the modern world and U.S. Army fielded material due to being highly recalcitrant and nonbiodegradable, giving rise to their pervasive presence in military packaging, infrastructure, supply chain logistics, and sustained operational readiness. The ability to break down, degrade, or reduce and reuse these plastics with biological enzymes shows promise to ease this logistical burden and improve battlefield sustainability while reducing the demands of deployment. Yet large-scale material studies remain limited to short-duration manual benchtop procedures not conducive to meaningful polymer degradation. Here we describe a novel microfluidic device, the bioMATADOR (biocompatible Material Agnostic Testbed for Autonomous Degradation of Recalcitrants). The bioMATADOR accommodates a variety of material packing during fabrication along with solvent turnover and volume fill rates and flow patterns, while maintaining high optical clarity and light transmittance to allow for easy viewing and microscopy. The bioMATADOR presents a cost- and time-effective platform to both accelerate discovery of polymer-degrading enzymes and streamline material degradation analysis by enabling custom, long-term, autonomous experiments.