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good news indeed that our earth has some hope, read on to know more. cheers! New 'Mutant Enzymes' Could Solve Earth's Plastics ProblemScientists accidentally created an enzyme that can break down plastic. But is it any better than recycling? You might call it a happy accident: As environmentalists urge the world to address the plastic pollution crisis, a team of researchers has unwittingly engineered an enzyme that may, one day, literally eat our troubles away. Biologists at the U.K.’s University of Portsmouth were studying the structure of an enzyme that can break down polyester when they found a way to tweak it. The result, according to a study published this week in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, is a “mutant enzyme” that can degrade plastics 20 percent more efficiently than its original form. The enzyme comes from a bacteria, Ideonella sakaiensis 201-F6, which was discovered in 2016 by Japanese researchers, who subsequently found that it could completely break down a thin layer of low-quality plastic within six weeks. Structural biologist John McGeehan and his team have now taken that enzyme and genetically engineered it so that it can begin the process in a matter of days. That kind of discovery is cause for excitement: It takes centuries for polyester, scientifically known as polyethylene terephthalate or PET, to degrade naturally. All this is just the beginning, though. McGeehan told the Guardian that his team wants to speed up the process even more, and find ways to scale it for industrial use. More importantly, the team imagines that the research can help prevent more plastic from entering the market in the first place. “What we are hoping to do is use this enzyme to turn this plastic back into its original components, so we can literally recycle it back to plastic,” McGeehan told the Guardian. To grasp what that would mean for the environment, just consider this startling statistic: 1 million plastic bottles are produced each minute. Roughly 10 percent of that gets recycled; the rest ends up in landfills, oceans, and parks. What is recycled often gets used in textiles, like clothes and carpets. Very few actually become bottles again. So, in theory, if McGeehan’s accidental discovery proves successful, the world could see a future in which we no longer need to dig up more oil to make plastic bottles. https://flipboard.com/@flipboard/-new-mutant-enzymes-could-solve-earths-p/f-a69394c522%2Fcitylab.com