4.8 Article

Fast Depolymerization of PET Bottle Mediated by Microwave Pre-Treatment and An Engineered PETase

Journal

CHEMSUSCHEM
Volume -, Issue -, Pages -

Publisher

WILEY-V C H VERLAG GMBH
DOI: 10.1002/cssc.202300742

Keywords

plastic biodegradation; polyethylene terephthalate recycling; microwave pre-treatment; polyesterase; enzyme engineering

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Recycling plastics is crucial for achieving a sustainable materials economy. Biocatalytic degradation of plastics using microwave irradiation as a pre-treatment process, followed by enzymatic reaction, shows promising results in improving substrate accessibility and increasing conversion yield.
Recycling plastics is the key to reaching a sustainable materials economy. Biocatalytic degradation of plastics shows great promise by allowing selective depolymerization of man-made materials into constituent building blocks under mild aqueous conditions. However, insoluble plastics have polymer chains that can reside in different conformations and show compact secondary structures that offer low accessibility for initiating the depolymerization reaction by enzymes. In this work, we overcome these shortcomings by microwave irradiation as a pre-treatment process to deliver powders of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) particles suitable for subsequent biotechnology-assisted plastic degradation by previously generated engineered enzymes. An optimized microwave step resulted in 1400 times higher integral of released terephthalic acid (TPA) from high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), compared to original untreated PET bottle. Biocatalytic plastic hydrolysis of substrates originating from PET bottles responded to 78 % yield conversion from 2 h microwave pretreatment and 1 h enzymatic reaction at 30 & DEG;C. The increase in activity stems from enhanced substrate accessibility from the microwave step, followed by the administration of designer enzymes capable of accommodating oligomers and shorter chains released in a productive conformation.

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