Researchers Create Plastic-Degrading Enzyme Cocktail
RandomFactor writes:
Plastic in landfills, like nuclear waste, is notoriously long lived. However in the past 50 years, bacteria have evolved to be capable of eating it. Now researchers have collaborated to improve on what nature started.
In 2018, University of Portsmouth's Professor John McGeehan and colleagues engineered an enzyme that can digest polyethylene terephthalate (PET), the primary material used in the manufacture of single-use plastic beverage bottles. Now, the same team has created a two-enzyme cocktail that can digest PET up to six times faster.
Plastics pollution represents a global environmental crisis. In response, microbes are evolving the capacity to utilize synthetic polymers as carbon and energy sources.
In 2016, a team of Japanese biologists reported the discovery and characterization of the soil bacterium, Ideonella sakaiensis 201-F6, which uses two enzymes to depolymerize PET to its constituent monomers.
In the new study, they combined PETase and a second enzyme called MHETase, found in the soil bacterium, to generate a two-enzyme system for PET deconstruction.
The new two-enzyme system is several times faster at degrading plastic than the separate enzymes evolved by bacteria and opens the door for additional research and improvement.
Journal Reference:
Brandon C. Knott, Erika Erickson, Mark D. Allen, et al.
Characterization and engineering of a two-enzyme system for plastics depolymerization [open], Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2006753117)
Previously:
Newly Engineered Enzyme Can Break Down PET Plastic to Raw Materials
UK MPs Propose Banning Microbeads
Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) Munching Bacteria Discovered
Ban on Microbeads Passes U.S. House of Representatives
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