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RandomFactor [soylentnews.org] writes:

Plastic in landfills, like nuclear waste, is notoriously long lived. However in the past 50 years, bacteria have evolved [wikipedia.org] to be capable of eating it. Now researchers have collaborated to improve on what nature started. [sci-news.com]

In 2018, University of Portsmouth’s Professor John McGeehan and colleagues engineered an enzyme that can digest polyethylene terephthalate (PET), the primary material used in the manufacture of single-use plastic beverage bottles. Now, the same team has created a two-enzyme cocktail that can digest PET up to six times faster.

Plastics pollution represents a global environmental crisis. In response, microbes are evolving the capacity to utilize synthetic polymers as carbon and energy sources.

In 2016, a team of Japanese biologists reported [sci-news.com] the discovery and characterization of the soil bacterium, Ideonella sakaiensis 201-F6, which uses two enzymes to depolymerize PET to its constituent monomers.

In the new study, they combined PETase and a second enzyme called MHETase, found in the soil bacterium, to generate a two-enzyme system for PET deconstruction.

The new two-enzyme system is several times faster at degrading plastic than the separate enzymes evolved by bacteria and opens the door for additional research and improvement.

Journal Reference:
Brandon C. Knott, Erika Erickson, Mark D. Allen, et al.
Characterization and engineering of a two-enzyme system for plastics depolymerization [open], Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2006753117 [doi.org])

Original Submission