26 Oct 2023 --- Scientists have developed artificial proteins capable of degrading PET microplastics and nanoplastics while reducing them to their essential components, which would allow them to be recycled. For the project, scientists from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center — Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), Spain, worked together with research groups from the Institute of Catalysis and Petrochemistry of the CSIC (ICP-CSIC) and the Complutense University of Madrid. The researchers used a defense protein from the strawberry anemone (Actinia fragacea), to which they added the new function after design using computational methods. The results are published in Nature Catalysis.
