Researchers have now created an enzyme 'cocktail' which can digest plastic up to six times faster than previous methods. PETase as been combined with a second enzyme, found on a bacterium that resides and eats plastic bottles.
PETase breaks down polyethylene terephthalate (PET) into its building blocks, enabling a realistic means to decrease the massive plastic accumulation on this planet. PET is the most common thermoplastic, and it takes centuries to degrade. With the addition of PETase, shit degradation can be shortened to days.
The research team engineered the natural PETase enzyme in the laboratory to be 20 percent faster at breaking down PET. Now the same group of researchers combined PETase and MHETase, to double the speed of PET breakdown. Their findings were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. The team was co-led by Professor John McGeehan, Director of the Centre for Enzyme Innovation (CEI) at the University of Portsmouth, and Dr. Gregg Beckham, Senior Research Fellow at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in the US.
Professor McGeehan commented, "Gregg and I were chatting about how PETase attacks the surface of the plastics and MHETase chops things up further, so it seemed natural to see if we could use them together, mimicking what happens in nature.” He continued, “Our first experiments showed that they did indeed work better together, so we decided to try to physically link them, like two Pac-men joined by a piece of string. It took a great deal of work on both sides of the Atlantic, but it was worth the effort - we were delighted to see that our new chimeric enzyme is up to three times faster than the naturally evolved separate enzymes, opening new avenues for further improvements."