One man’s trash is this enzyme’s lunch.
A team of scientists in Britain and at the U.S. Department of Energy say that they have bolstered the ability of an enzyme discovered in Japan to eat the plastic found in soda bottles.
The plastic polyethylene terephthalate (PET) normally lasts for hundreds of years, but a release from the University of Portsmouth and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory says that a new bacteria will be able to chow down and speed up the process to deal with the huge amounts of waste humans make.
Ideonella sakaiensis 201-F6 was discovered at a Japanese bottle recycling plant in 2016 and was seen degrading PET at a slow rate before scientists tried mutating it to turn it into a honed bottle destroyer.
“We hoped to determine its structure to aid in protein engineering, but we ended up going a step further and accidentally engineered an enzyme with improved performance at breaking down these (plastics),” NREL scientist Brian Donohue said.
The newly made enzyme also works on polyethylene furandicarboxylate, or PEF, which has been used as a substitute for PET, and the researchers say that they will continue trying to improve it so it can be used on an industrial scale.
Though the rise of plastics since the 1960s has led to tons of trash floating around the world’s oceans, the discovery brings hope that plastic bottles will soon stop their accumulation in our water.
The full results of the study will be published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
