EASTBIO Towards Sustainable Plastics via Microbes

Sustainable approaches to plastic generation, and technologies to enable plastic degradation are critical to our planet. To this end, we will combine our interdisciplinary expertise in complementary areas around computational and practical enzymology to study ways of making plastics and their lifecycles more sustainable through the use of microbes.

The principal focus of our work will be the computation and modelling of the interaction of microbes with microplastics. This will include modelling of bacterial attachment to microplastics via native and engineered adhesins, and working towards rational mutants of proteins and glycoproteins which are predicted to have increased binding. Another goal of this work is to use our existing expertise on the mechanisms of Ideonella sakaiensis PETase and MHETase towards a viable system for degradation of PET microplastics.

This project is intended to generate knowledge and expertise essential to our future plans for developing engineered enzymes for synthesis of novel sustainable plastics, based on Nature’s impressive arrays of gene clusters, enzymes and natural products.