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A new study published in Trends in Biotechnology, led by José I. Jiménez from Imperial College London and involving collaborators from the University of Surrey, Northwest University, Leipzig University, Kyungpook National University, Bacmine, and RWTH Aachen University, together with Zheren Zhang from the Centre for Molecular Cell Biology, shows how environmental bacteria can be engineered to break down and grow on PET plastic.

The research focused on poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET), one of the most widely used plastics in packaging and textiles, which persists in the environment as macro- and microplastic pollution. While enzymes that break down PET have been studied extensively in the test tube, living microbial systems able to use PET directly as a food source have remained scarce, particularly for hard-to-collect waste such as microplastics.

To address this, the team isolated an environmental strain of Pseudomonas umsongensis capable of feeding on terephthalic acid, one of PET's building blocks, and engineered it to secrete a highly active PET-degrading enzyme (PHL7). Combined with a solvent-based pretreatment that makes the plastic more accessible to enzymes, the engineered bacterium was able to hydrolyse PET and use it to sustain its own growth.

Crucially, the strain also survived and broke down PET microplastics in untreated wastewater, outperforming a naturally occurring plastic-degrading bacterium under the same conditions. These findings point towards using engineered microbes for the bioremediation of microplastic pollution and the sustainable upcycling of plastic waste into value-added products.

Explore this study in more detail: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tibtech.2026.06.008