You and Betty and the Nancy's and Bill's and Joes and Jane's will find in the study of science

a richer, more rewarding life.

Hey, welcome to Inquiring Minds.

I'm Indravis Gantus.

This is a podcast that explores the space where science and society collide.

We want to find out what's true, what's left to discover,

and why it matters. Joining me today is our correspondent Adam Bristol. Welcome back, Adam.

Hi, Indra. Thanks for having me. And we thought that we do an up-to-date episode covering news that has nothing to do with COVID-19,

but that you might have missed because, well, all the news sources are covering all the coronavirus stuff.

So, Adam, what came across your desk recently? Well, I guess two papers came across my desk that I found particularly interesting, and they're

in pretty different areas of biology, but areas that I care a lot about.

The first was in the April 8th issue of nature, and it has to do with a bacteria-derived enzyme, or actually I should

say that wrong. It's a biological enzyme that can break down the plastic that we use for water

bottles. Wait, what? So like, there's an enzyme that somehow has been designed to break down plastic?

Yeah, so it turns out there's a pretty long history in this.

You have a number of species of both bacteria and fungi that have evolved hydrolases that can

break down the primary constituent of a plastic water bottle, which is a type of

plastic called polyethylene teraphylate or pet, P-E-T. So it's interesting because some of these have

been discovered literally in the compost heaps in and around recycling facilities. And so this paper, which was from some research groups in France, took a known biological,

kind of a wild type species of hydrolace, which was actually known as leaf branch compost

cutinase, or LLC, and re-engineered it to have better properties to basically do its work more

efficiently and also have some thermostability because the way that pet is recycled today is we

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