Sunday, June 14, 2020

Unlocking the secrets of a plastic-eater at MIT

No reason to panic over plastic waste! Human ingenuity triumphs anytime! Even mother nature has already developed microbes to munch on human artifacts like plastic.



"Before arriving at MIT, Zhong began looking for organisms that could degrade plastic and learned that a group in Japan had published a paper on Ideonella sakaiensis. “It’s this weird environmental microbe that really likes digesting weird compounds,” says Zhong. One of those weird compounds is PET."



Unlocking the secrets of a plastic-eater | MIT News Graduate student Linda Zhong and professor of biology Anthony Sinskey are studying the plastic-devouring enzyme PETase as a way to improve recycling.

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