Plastics degradation by hydrolytic enzymes: the Plastics-Active Enzymes
Database - PAZy
Abstract
Petroleum based plastics are durable and accumulate in all ecological
niches. Knowledge on enzymatic degradation is sparse. Today, less than
50 verified plastics-active enzymes are known. First examples of enzymes
acting on the polymers polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and polyurethane
(PUR) have been reported together with a detailed biochemical and
structural description. Further, very few polyamide (PA) oligomer active
enzymes are known. In this paper, the current known enzymes acting on
the synthetic polymers PET and PUR are briefly summarized, their
published activity data were collected and integrated into a
comprehensive open access database. The Plastics-Active Enzymes Database
(PAZy) represents an inventory of known and experimentally verified
plastics-active enzymes. Almost 3000 homologues of PET-active enzymes
were identified by profile hidden Markov models. Over 2000 homologues of
PUR-active enzymes were identified by BLAST. Based on multiple sequence
alignments, conservation analysis identified the most conserved amino
acids, and sequence motifs for PET- and PUR-active enzymes were derived.