Scientists engineer a better "plastic-eating" enzyme
Plastics have revolutionized modern human life thanks to their low cost, versatility and durability. Yet, it is this latter advantage that has also made them a noxious burden on the environment as some plastics can take up to a thousand years to decompose. This plastic pollution poses a hazard to animal life and human health. In fact, there's is enough plastic in the oceans that it now accumulates in big oceanic garbage islands and it is expected that by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in Earth's oceans. To help counter this problem, scientists have been trying to either find or artificially induce the creation of microorganisms possessing enzymes (proteins that can catalyze chemical reactions) capable of digesting plastics. Now, in a paper published yesterday April 17th, a multinational team of scientists describe their big leap towards achieving this goal.
The story began in 2016 when a different group working in Japan published the discovery of bacteria belonging to the species Ideonella sakaiensis that could naturally degrade Poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET), a plastic used in bottles, clothing and carpets. The bacteria was originally found in a bottle-recycling facility in Japan, and it is believed to have evolved its plastic-munching proclivities relatively recently from an original ability to degrade cutin, a waxy water-repellent coating found on plants. The scientists behind the more recent publication thought that by further analyzing the structure of the PET-degrading enzymes produced by the bacteria—of particular interest, one enzyme named 'PETase'—they could gain basic insights to later take advantage of. But they got lucky quicker than that.
"Serendipity often plays a significant role in fundamental scientific research, and our discovery here is no exception," explains John McGeehan, professor of structural biology at the University of Portsmouth and one of the team leaders behind the new study. In this case, serendipity struck when his team decided to create mutant versions of PETase with a modified PET-binding site, simply to assess how that binding site functioned... but as luck would have it, one of these mutants had improved PET degradation capabilities.
Despite these encouraging results, the modified enzyme is still too slow to be of immediate use, but the authors highlight its potential in other ways: it is able to "drill holes" in a different plastic known as polyethylene furandicarboxylate (PEF) and the success of this study means that further modifications to PETase and other enzymes could create a plastic-killing cocktail sooner rather than later.
Read the original paper here:
"Characterization and engineering of a plastic-degrading aromatic polyesterase" at PNAS
Further reading and sources:
"Research Team Engineers a Better Plastic-Degrading Enzyme" at NREL
"A bacterium that degrades and assimilates poly(ethylene terephthalate)" at Science
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