Abstract

This review aims to name and describe the research in South America on polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs), one of the most studied and analyzed biopolymers obtained from biological sources. In the last five years, many publications on this topic have surged from several South American countries. Sadly, a great number of these publications appear in databases that are not commonly used by non-South American researchers, such as SciELO and national journals. Several groups have worked in the improvement of the capacities of PHAs, in terms of testing cheap carbon sources, improving metabolic pathways in the native strain or by transferring the synthesis genes to other strains, evaluation of the polymer properties depending on the use, among others, but the situation of unknown databases may produce an unexpected difficulty to find common research to achieve fruitful cooperation between research groups. Ultimately, the main objective of this manuscript is to solve this problem by informing other researchers about PHA work in South America.