Researchers in the US and Britain have accidentally engineered an enzyme which eats plastic and may eventually help solve the growing problem of plastic pollution. The breakthrough could help solve the global plastic pollution crisis by enabling for the first time the full recycling of bottles.
More than 8 million tonnes of plastic are dumped in the world’s oceans every year, and concern is mounting over this petroleum derived product’s toxic legacy on human health and the environment. Despite recycling efforts, most plastic can persist for hundreds of years in the environment, so researchers are searching for better ways to eliminate it.
Known as ‘Ideonella sakaiensis’, it appears to feed exclusively on a type of plastic known as polyethylene terephthalate (PET), used widely in plastic bottles. The researchers’ goal was to understand how one of it’s enzymes-called- PETase- worked, by figuring out its structure. But they ended up going a step further and accidentally engineered an enzyme which was even better at breaking down PET plastics.
Using a super-powerful X-ray, 10 billion times brighter than the sun, they were able to make an ultra-high-resolution three-dimensional model of the enzyme. Scientists from the University of Florida and University of Campinas in Brazil did computer modeling which showed PETase looked similar to another enzyme, cutinase, found in fungus and bacteria. One of the area of the PETase was a bit different, though, researchers hypothesized that this was the part that allowed it to degrade man made plastic.
So they mutated the PETase active site to make it more like cutinase, and unexpectedly found that this mutant enzyme was even better than the natural PETase at breaking down PET. Researchers are now working on further improvements to the enzyme, with the hope of eventually scaling it up for the industrial use in breaking down plastics.
By- Dr. Bhawana Asnani.
Matter Referenced: Times of India, Ahmedabad, Thursday, 19th April, 2018.
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