New FAST PET enzymes promise closed loop plastic manufacturing

Here is a link to the molecule of the month. This is the new fast pet ace enzyme. It was engineered using a machine learning program to develop this enzyme so I thought It deserved a thread of its own to explore this revolutionary new technology I will be adding links to the thread as I find things I will start this one because it contains the most factual data about the enzyme with the least amount of opinion conjecture and Imagineering it’s more strictly science so I thought I would lead with this one.

pdb101.rcsb.org...

This next link is the link to the nature article about the topic with the published references citations and abstract but it does not have the complete paper that’s why I started off with the other link which has more background data and factual information.

www.nature.com...

Again well it is not the full paper just an abstract it does have a lot of the information that will lead you to other papers written by the scientist that wrote this one and that is how I found this paper which is related to it but I managed to get a full copy of this one because it was one of the few that was not protected by some sort of a institution Gateway as the others are.

1.8 MB PDF file. www.biorxiv.org...

That’s all I’ve got so far but this will get you started if you’re interested in this I’m pretty excited a future where we can close the loop on plastic and have this material fully recycled would be a good future especially if it can be done affordably and in a non-toxic safe manner I’m all for that.

So after a quick flick through I gather that due to a molecular sheering effect regular plastic recycling processes can only be done a few times before the material degrades to a point it is no longer useful due to the molecular chains being to short to properly bind. This new enzyme will breakdown the molecular chains and allow them to reform back to the initial state an infinite number of times.

Pretty cool beans. Game changer.

a reply to: machineintelligence

a reply to: machineintelligence
A modified hydrolase is an interesting advance. I note that the process at 50 C takes a week, so the volume of a commercial reactor would be a consideration as well as maintaining the temperature for kinetics without overheating. There will probably be a separation step to clean up the products (ethylene glycol and terephthalic acid) before recycle.

ETA: @Athetos, there will be losses at each recycle so it will eventually disappear. This will be more expensive than existing recycle processes, so it may be used when the plastic is no longer suitable for traditional recycling.

a reply to: machineintelligence

Awesome, can't be implemented fast enough.
...and only took us 40 years... lol

originally posted by: Peeple
a reply to: machineintelligence

Awesome, can't be implemented fast enough.
...and only took us 40 years... lol

We didn't have the ability to edit genes and PET recycling worked with what we had. It's just a polyester and could be chemically hydrolyzed. Bio units are touchy and P-T limited so turning up the heat and pressure to speed things up is not an option. Implementation will take a while because scale-up isn't fast and costs will have to be determined to see if it is financially feasible.