scientists have engineered an enzyme which can digest some of our most commonly polluting plastics, providing a potential solution to one of the world's biggest environmental problems.
The discovery could result in a recycling solution for millions of tonnes of plastic bottles. "The research was led by teams at the University of Portsmouth and the US Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory and is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."
The researchers are now working on improving the enzyme further to allow it to be used industrially to break down plastics in a fraction of the time.
Professor McGeehan, states, "We can all play a significant part in dealing with the plastic problem, but the scientific community who ultimately created these 'wonder-materials', must now use all the technology at their disposal to develop real solutions."
The researchers made the breakthrough when they were examining the structure of a natural enzyme which is thought to have evolved in a waste recycling centre in Japan, allowing a bacterium to degrade plastic as a food source.
PET, patented as a plastic in the 1940s, has not existed in nature for very long, so the team set out to determine how the enzyme evolved and if it might be possible to improve it.
The goal was to determine its structure, but they ended up going a step further and accidentally engineered an enzyme which was even better at breaking down plastics.
Source : Carrington, Damian. “Scientists Accidentally Create Mutant Enzyme That Eats Plastic Bottles.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 16 Apr. 2018, www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/16/scientists-accidentally-create-mutant-enzyme-that-eats-plastic-bottles
Comments
Post a Comment