The Morpheus project won a silver medal at the 2024 iGEM Grand Jamboree!
Plastic pollution's devastating impacts on ecosystems and human health is clear. In marine environments expecially, around 8 million metric tons of plastic enter the ocean annually, severely affecting species like sea turtles, fish, and birds, who ingest or become entangled in, debris. Seagrass beds and coral reefs are suffocated by plastic waste, disrupting the delicate ecosystems they support. By 2040, plastic in marine environments is expected to nearly triple, adding 23 to 37 million metric tons annually, threatening biodiversity and food security. Additionally, plastic waste is also linked to climate change. In 2015, the production of plastics emitted 1.7 gigatonnes of CO2, and this figure is projected to rise to 6.5 gigatonnes by 2050. This exacerbates global warming, intensifying environmental degradation. On land, microplastics infiltrate agricultural soils, waterways, and even the food chain, affecting human health by causing hormonal changes, developmental issues, and reproductive abnormalities. These examples highlight the urgent need for global action to curb plastic pollution at its source. This highlights the need for a global circular economy
We know of current ways PET can be recycled through various mechanical, chemical and bio-engineered pathways...so why isn't it ? We identified 3 main hurdles that currently slows down PET recycling.
Our aim was to build on existing methods to propose something new. The tried and tested PETase-MEHTase enzymatic pathway will be key to the development of a new chemical pathway in the phototrophic algae that will be our model organism : Chlamydomonas reinhardtii.
Whether it be the Kaiserslautern 2019 team or our own 2020 team, our organism is one that has gotten a lot of love and attention those past years. Crucially, our PI Pr. Pierre Crozet is a leading expert in this very same organism, which bolstered our choice to work with this one-of-a-kind algae. It’s an iGEM staple that we seeked to improve upon. The question is : how?
Our Chlamydomonas will be engineered with a custom made plasmid to ensure it can breakdown PET. Then we will feed it a carbon-source in order to ensure the conversion of a byproduct of the PET hydrolysis into a high-value compound, vanillic acid.
