https://video.igem.org/videos/watch/62fc73e7-f107-48a6-8151-5f49a30d041f Title: PetaBite: Accelerating the Discovery of Scalable Plastic-Degrading Enzymes Description: iGEM Toronto presents PetaBite, a scalable solution to the plastic pollution crisis. Microplastics have infiltrated our ecosystems and even human tissues. Enzymes that break down PET exist, but the best-characterized ones only work in narrow lab conditions, which is why none of them have reached a wastewater plant or a river. We are engineering PETases that that function in complex environments like wastewater plants, rivers, and mixed‑plastic waste streams. Finding them meant searching further than anyone had ever looked. Using the Logan index of all 27.3 million public sequencing datasets, we mined 300 million candidate plastic-degrading enzymes, roughly 150,000 times the ~2000 described before. With this, we created the PETadex, the largest open database of plastic-degrading enzymes in the world, free for any researcher to search, benchmark, and add to. Moreover, a random screen of 161 candidates found two that outperform FAST-PETase, the engineered industry standard. Our wet lab validates hits with our own in-house assays, and our hardware team builds low-cost bioreactor arrays that test enzymes across temperature, pH, and salinity, feeding every measurement back into the model. Next, we are turning this into an enzyme platform for waste management, industrial pretreatment, and freshwater cleanup, then extending beyond PET to every major plastic. Wiki | Official Page Tue, 01 Sep 2026 16:55:40 GMT https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html PeerTube - https://video.igem.org https://video.igem.org/client/assets/images/icons/icon-1500x1500.png https://video.igem.org/videos/watch/62fc73e7-f107-48a6-8151-5f49a30d041f All rights reserved, unless otherwise specified in the terms specified at https://video.igem.org/about and potential licenses granted by each content's rightholder.