Results

System Working Under Real World Conditions.

Using the Real World Substrate

Our project this year is about biodegradation of the widely used palstic PET. As a polymer, PET is hard to degrade and the degrading process is time-consuming. Due to the mild condition of the biodegradation reaction and the restriction of growing of organisms, it is even slower although it is more environmental friendly. Therefore, we use the substitute pNPA (p-nitrophenyl acetate), a kind of small molecular ester as the reagent of enzymatic reaction. However, pNPA is not what we really want to degrade, so we need to measure the PET degrading effects of our enzyme. Actually, pNPA is mainly used to screen for the mutated PETase gene because of the high requirement of efficiency of this step. When we obtain the mutants we want, we used them to degrade PET. In order to simulate the real world condition as much as possible, we used the PET film bought from the online plastic products shop instead of the test reagent bought from the chemical company. The film is originally used as packing material. We soak the cut film into the 75% ethanol solution and wash them with double distilled water before degrading experiments.

Experiment Data of Respective Section

Protein Engineering

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Microbial Consortium

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R-R system

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