Computational Approach to Discovering Plastic Degradation Enzymes

With at least 150 million tons of plastic already in oceans and over 10 million tons of plastic entering oceans annually, plastic waste has become a major global problem. Current methods to address this problem such as incineration and landfills are unsustainable and environmentally harmful. More trending approaches such as the degradation of plastic using microbial enzymes are rarely efficient enough to be applied industrially. To fill this gap in our knowledge, we developed a computational method called IPDE (Identification of Plastic Degradation Enzymes) to systematically identify promising enzymes, enzyme combinations, and microbial species for effective plastic waste degradation. Using IPDE, we discovered 32 enzymes in ocean microbiomes, with at least 16 (50.0%) having a role in plastic degradation. Additionally, we identified 37 significant enzyme combinations, 8 (21.6%) of which contain enzymes that co-occur in the same metabolic pathways. Furthermore, we found 60 microbial species, 16 (26.6%) of which have been implied to be linked to plastic degradation in literature. The results from IPDE provide promising candidates for experimental validation, protein engineering, and industrial application to tackle this plastic waste problem. The IPDE tool is freely available at https://github.com/SophieL8/Plastic-degrading-enzymes.