A brief description

This March our team paid much attention to an article ‘A bacterium that degrades and assimilates poly (ethylene terephthalate)’published in Science in the same month. A new kind of bacteria that can decompose PET was found and studied in detail. We plan to express its unique genes in some commonly used mode organisms such as yeasts and E.colis to enhance its activities of decomposition significantly since they are relatively low at present.

Current situation:

We have synthesized the gene sequences of the PETase and MHETase based on the supplementary materials of the original paper after several months’ literature reviewing. And we began several preliminary experiments to figure out if those exogenous genes could be well expressed in the host cells. We decide to enhance the activities of these two enzymes via surface display, protein scaffold and fusion expression. Another way to enhance the rate of reactions is to put the first (hydrolysis of PET) and the second step (hydrolysis of MHET) together by cascade catalysis.

Vision:

We hope to construct a system that can efficiently express and secrete (or display) these two enzymes. The system will be able to hydrolyze PET with a much higher rate than the Ideonella sakaiensis reported in the thesis.