Plastic Perish

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  Our enzyme and its ligand

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  Plastic Perish introduction, along with our welcoming statement

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  Key terms: PET, Atherosclerosis, TF Cutinase 2, Ligand

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  The process we followed in order to build this solution

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  References for this solution, which are listed in IEEE format

We recognized the heartbreaking amount of plastic in our oceans and landfills, and were dismayed at the currently inadequate disposal methods for resolving this issue. We knew there was a better way, and we felt that a bio-based method of degradation would be within our team's skill sets. Thus, we designed Plastic Perish, an enzyme that breaks down plastics.

Plastic Perish is an enzyme that degrades PET (specifically Tf cutinase 2). The end goal is to attach the enzyme to the surface of a 3D biofilm.

We built it by docking the PET ligand into the enzyme and simulating their interaction. Once finished, we used PROSS to design stabilizing mutations on the protein and compare its energy to the wildtype.

Some challenges we overcame were obtaining the surface display of our enzyme and debugging simulations.

As a team, we're proud of our individual efforts in research, enzyme engineering and simulations, and our successful product pitch. We hope you're inspired by our work!

What's next for Plastic Perish

Next, we intend to work on scaling up the production process to implement in landfills everywhere.

A cheap environmentally friendly and self-sustained solution to the plastic problem

Built With

• autodockvina
• gromacs
• pross
• slideshare