RE: .17 Apr 2018 12:32
Desperate de-ramping attempts.
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It will take a while before these innovations can be leveraged to break down the billions of tonnes of plastic we've already amassed, but now that we've got a proof of concept, we can use science to give nature a helping hand at breaking down an unnatural material that just won't go away fast enough otherwise.
"What we've learned is that PETase is not yet fully optimised to degrade PET," biotechnologist Gregg Beckham from NREL explains.
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Yet big challenges lie ahead in turning an ingenious discovery into a real-world application. Developing a technique for producing the enzyme cheaply will be one key hurdle; another will be to harness its power on an industrial scale. But this is an example of accelerated science. A type of bacteria evolved to live off plastic in the last few decades. The enzyme it uses to digest PET was only recently identified.
Now we have details of the newly engineered and more efficient version of that enzyme. In the search for scientific solutions to the plastic pollution crisis, momentum like this is vital.