New Plastic-Eating Enzyme Disintegrates Waste Till Its Final Building Blocks

We’ve seen a bunch of enzymes over the past few years that have broken down common plastics like PET. however, now researchers have discovered one that can break down one of the key plastic building blocks that gets left behind by this process.

Unsplash

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Reported first by New Atlas, the new enzyme is based on a bacterium that first made its debut in 2016 in Japan where it showed a rather impressive appetite for PET and was able to disintegrate it in a matter of weeks.?

This was then bettered by researchers at the University of Portsmouth dubbed PETase and later upgraded to another variant dubbed MHETase to form a super enzyme that belches PET plastics six times faster.?

After the enzyme was done with PET, what remained were two chemical building blocks of PET -- ethylene glycol and TPA and both are equally problematic. The team later found an enzyme dubbed TPADO that disintegrates TPA and only TPA with never-before-seen efficiency.

They discovered the new enzyme by studying them at the Diamond Light Source Facility in the UK that blasts them with beams of powerful X-rays. What was left-back was an ultra-high-resolution model of the enzyme that reveals the individual atoms inside it, highlighting how TPADO truly destroys TPA. This shall act as a blueprint for scientists to engineer even more efficient versions of the enzyme.?

Rita Clare, Montana State University

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Study author Professor John McGeehan explains, “The last few years have seen incredible advances in the engineering of enzymes to break down PET plastic into its building blocks.”

“This work goes a stage further and looks at the first enzyme in a cascade that can deconstruct those building blocks into simpler molecules. These can then be utilized by bacteria to generate sustainable chemicals and materials, essential making valuable products out of plastic waste.”?

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