The iGEM Toronto PETase project aims to accelerate the discovery and characterization of plastic-degrading enzymes at a global scale. By mining the Logan metagenomic assembly, one of the largest collections of environmental sequencing data, the project has identified over 216 million putative PETase sequences from diverse microbial communities worldwide.
These sequences are organized and made accessible through PETadex, a structured database and web platform that enables researchers to explore enzyme diversity, phylogenetic relationships, and predicted functional properties.
Why PET Plastic
PET is widely used in packaging and textiles, but it remains difficult to recycle efficiently at global scale. Biological recycling offers a promising route because enzymes can break PET into reusable chemical building blocks under conditions that may be less energy intensive than conventional approaches.
Our Strategy
The project combines large-scale computational search, targeted wet lab validation, and hardware that can test candidates under practical biorecycling conditions. This lets us move from sequence discovery to measurable enzyme behavior with a clearer experimental path.