Source: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 3/4/26
A team of researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and MIT have converted plastic waste into a microbe-friendly food source to build an upcycling pipeline that turns the waste into a variety of useful products. They engineered the bacterium Pseudomonas putida to convert polyethylene terephthalate, a main class of single-use plastics found in containers like water bottles, into pyruvate, a molecule that most organisms rely on to generate the cellular energy and biomass that sustain them. The researchers also developed a series of specialist microbes, each of which consumes pyruvate to produce a unique end-product. Such products include biopolymers and enzymes used in medicine, chemicals and fuels used in engineering, and electricity for powering electronics. Their findings have been published in the journal Nature Sustainability.