A.I. Just Designed An Enzyme That Eats Plastic

hi welcome to another episode of cold fusion so i've just had covered so if my voice sounds a bit funny that's why anyway on to the video over many decades plastic waste has become a major problem not just for the environment but to us as humans as well in fact recently plastic has been detected in human organs and this year for the first time it's been detected in human blood many are sleeping on the issue but maybe something can be done you are watching cold fusion tv in 2016 japanese scientists were sifting through the debris of a plastic bottle recycling plant they were in search of a bacterium that could degrade plastic the type of plastic that the scientists were looking for was polyethylene pteraphophthalate or p-e-t for short this type of plastic accounts for 12 of all global solid waste if you've ever used a water bottle that's p-e-t it's found in a lot of other modern products including clothing and packaging estimates say about 50 million tonnes are produced every year globally by 2025 this could be 100 million tons as the demand for the material grows so does the mountain of plastic waste in landfills as pet-based products are notoriously difficult to recycle the goal of the japanese scientist trash hunt was to find a bacterium that could use pet as its energy source after bringing plastic samples back to a lab what they found was ideonella cycaensis a bacteria that amazingly eats plastic and converts it to carbon dioxide from here the team discovered that the organism has two enzymes that break down the plastic into basic components we'll talk about the importance of the enzyme soon so in short the bacteria completely digested the plastic and used it to power its what's left is carbon dioxide and the monomers usually ethyl glycol and pterophalic acid these components can make new plastic [Music] plastics like pet are made from little chemicals joined in a chain the enzyme unlinks that chain and then you get a bunch of components you can then use these components and recycle them into another chain so basically this enzyme could be used in the recycling process without any extra energy input well you might be thinking that's great why haven't we used this everywhere well there's one problem in the real world the bacteria and even the isolated enzymes weren't very practical it did the job but it was very fussy about it if the temperature was too low or too high or the ph wasn't just right it wouldn't work effectively there had to be a way to improve this knowing that an enzyme consists of amino acids linked together to form proteins if these amino acids could be tweaked perhaps the enzyme would perform better but how could this be done enter ai [Music] in may of 2022 a team from the university of texas at austin in the united states used a neural network to engineer and improve the performance and stability of the plastic destroying enzyme a machine learning algorithm was in charge of modifying the amino acids in the enzyme the neural network called mute compute studied a diverse range of 19 000 proteins of a similar size it was to learn the patterns of what makes a protein stable according to hal alpa who was the principal investigator of the study amino acids that fit well within the protein are the key to stability an amino acid that isn't a good fit may be a source of instability when this happens the performance of the enzyme falls off when the algorithm saw that an amino acid might not fit well it suggested a different amino acid in its place for each of the 290 amino acids the program checks to see if it fits well within its immediate structural environment compared to other proteins within its knowledge base this means that it can balance the evolutionary trade-off between activity and stability which now when i think about it is insane we're observing nature and then hacking it to do our bidding out of the millions and millions of combinations the ai suggested three amino acid substitutions the team decided to go with the ai's design the result was quote highly highly active especially at lower temperatures compared to anything else that's out there the ai-designed enzyme broke down an entire plastic tray within 48 hours it breaks down plastic at over twice the speed and at lower temperatures compared to the next best engineered enzyme they demonstrated that untreated consumer pet plastics could almost completely be degraded in one week they tested 51 different products including whole plastic containers and bottles they were also able to make new recycled plastic objects that consumed much less energy than traditionally would be required the team managed to retrieve 94.9 percent of the raw materials needed to make new plastic [Music] since the plastic degrading is being done by an enzyme and not the whole bacteria it has the added benefit of not being able to reproduce uncontrollably other experts in the field are impressed sarah cacadilus he studies the plastics bioeconomy at the imperial college of london in the uk comet quote it's a drastic improvement compared to other enzymes that have been developed so far the great advantage of enzymes is that they can be much more specific than chemical catalysts it could be easier in theory to degrade much more diverse waste using enzymes what i really liked about the study is the fact that they took it outside the lab to some extent she's referring to trying the enzyme on real plastic products bought at a local supermarket instead of a lab buy-in wu from the chinese academy of science states quote this study proved the machine learning method is useful in enzyme engineering he goes on to state that the ai managed to uncover certain modifications that were ignored by other methods the texas team is continuing to investigate the practical aspects of enzyme recycling as well as expanding the range of materials so what are some drawbacks it should be noted that the enzyme's optimal working temperature is 50 degrees celsius which is too high to work in ambient conditions but perhaps with better neural networks we could take this optimal operating temperature down to ambient room temperature so in conclusion there are still massive amounts of work to be done to solve the plastic waste problem but this is the start really it is actually early days seeing that the enzyme itself was only found in 2016 but this latest news about ai making it much more practical i think is a bright spot to watch it's interesting because whenever i talk about ai there's a small subset of viewers that keep asking why can't ai do useful things to them my other episodes about ai making music art writing and having conversations was entirely useless but i think a super efficient enzyme designed by ai for the sole purpose of destroying plastic is something that most people could appreciate as we've already started to see on this channel the ai cycle of improvement is exponential so who knows what changes could come to enzyme design in the future so what do you guys think feel free to discuss here or on the cold fusion discord if you think more people should know about this feel free to pass this episode along so for some housekeeping i've been nominated for an award so i'll be traveling to amsterdam soon i'll try my best but if there's a gap in uploads this is why also check out the latest episode of the through the web podcast that i co-host we discuss some updates on the lunar dokuan situation for those interested anyway anyway that's it from me my name is digogo and you've been watching cold fusion and i'll see you again soon for the next episode cheers guys [Music] [Music] [Music] cold fusion it's me thinking

Channel: ColdFusion

Views: 1,000,080

Keywords: Coldfusion, TV, Dagogo, Altraide, Technology, Apple, Google, Samsung, Facebook, Tesla

Id: omo0rE4qATY

Length: 8min 26sec (506 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 02 2022