(482b) A Microbial Community Approach for Efficient PET Degradation

Biodegradation of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) has emerged as a promising approach for recycling PET waste. The dual-enzyme system PETase and MHETase, discovered in 2016 and its engineered variants have demonstrated significant potential in breaking down PET.

Bacteria has demonstrated efficacy as an engineered platform for plastic depolymerization. However, a critical requirement is that plastic depolymerizing enzymes must be either surface displayed or extracellularly secreted to target these large plastic polymers. This requirement poses significant challenges for microbes in terms of engineering tool availability, enzyme-specific secretion efficiency optimization, and host metabolic production and secretion burden. The complexity is further dramatically increased by the need of multiple enzymes in plastic waste stream treatment.

To address these limitations, we present a novel approach involving a dynamically engineered bacterial community capable of degrading PET via a bacterial surface-displayed enzyme complex. This microbial consortium was designed for efficient expression and surface display of PET-degrading enzymes. Using this community-based strategy, we achieved complete PET degradation with a four-fold increase in enzyme surface-display efficiency compared to conventional single-strain surface display systems.