Team:Makerere University/Description
Project description
Poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) is one of the most widely used plastic worldwide. However, the durability of PET results in its difficulty to be degraded which leads to a global accumulation of plastic waste. Many solutions have been brought up in dealing with the plastic waste. Compared to the traditional chemical recycling processes, enzymatic hydrolysis of PET is presently evaluated as an environmentally friendly strategy for recycling post-consumer PET wastes. And during the last 15 years, many natural enzymes extracted from microorganisms have been found to be capable of decomposing PET. In recent decades, many labs around the world have proposed a variety of ways to degrade PET biologically. The most inspiring one is the biodegradation ability of a recently found bacterial, called Ideonella sakaiensis 201-F6, by Shosuke Yoshida and his colleagues from Japan, which has been studied and published in Science this March . They analyzed the degrading pathways and isolated two kinds of enzymes, PETase and MHETase. The PETase degrades PET into MHET (mono(2-hydroxyethyl) terephthalic acid) and MHETase degrades MHET into TPA (terephthalic acid) and EG (ethylene glycol).
The project is set up to utilize the enzymatic machinery from the bacterium Ideonella sakaiensis as it is capable of manufacturing the enzymes of PETase and MHETase which are important in the degradation of PET.
Isolated segments of the genes for the respective enzymes are transformed into the a competent E. coli cell so that it also obtains the plastic degrading character as in Ideonella.
Ideonella sakaiensis is a bacteria that naturally decomposes polyethylene terephthalate, we decide to genetically modify E. coli cells to model the plastic degradation machine by adding the Lipase and Chlorogenate Esterase genes from Ideonella sakaiensis into E. coli bacterial cells. We shall obtain the two genes encoding the enzymes used by Ideonella sakaiensis, PETase and MHETase, and insert the gene into E. coli plasmids and then put the plasmids into E. coli cells. With the engineered E.coli bacteria, the enzymes produced are able to express the plastic-degrading abilities
Goal: To have a clean and safe environment free of plastic pollution.
Objectives.
- To engineer a bacteria capable of degrading PET plastics.
- To sensitize the community about the danger associated with plastic wastes.