ENVIRONMENT agencies can now predict whether a chemical will biodegrade before it is even manufactured.
The production of new chemicals is outstripping our ability to assess how each one will be broken down by micro-organisms, says Victor de Lorenzo at the National Centre for Biotechnology in Madrid, Spain. “The last 50 years have produced data on only 900 chemicals. There are tens of thousands for which there is no data.”
De Lorenzo’s team has now developed software that can distinguish biodegradable molecules from those that resist degradation, based on a database of known microbial metabolic reactions. By focusing on groups of three atoms known as atomic…
