Plastic pollution

Plastic pollution is one of the most important environmental crises we currently face; as micro-plastics are currently being found inside every living creature on Earth, including our own blood, intestines and brains, this problem may be even more urgent than the climate crisis.
With this research project, Evolae wants to contribute to a durable solution for this problem, which forms a serious threat to all life on Earth.

In a discussion about plastic and its negative side effects, Evolae’s founder predicted in 1997 that nature would try to adapt to this ‘alien’ substance infesting the ecosystem. By now this prediction has come true, as all over the world organisms are being found capable of digesting and recycling plastic. However, these adaptations are very much still ‘first attempts’ of nature, as so far none of them is efficient enough to form a real answer to plastic pollution.

Research design

Several other research groups have isolated enzymes from these plastic-digesting organisms, and are trying to adjust these for industrial application. But we wanted to take a different approach. Instead of trying to modify these enzymes ourselves, we aimed to let the organism do this for us, by stimulating or enhancing the evolutionary process that created them in the first place.
To achieve this, we worked with two different micro-organisms in which plastic-processing capabilities had been discovered. We designed a series of experiments to first confirm, and then hopefully enhance this ability.

Results

To our surprise, we found that these organisms aren’t always capable of digesting plastic. Apparently, this ability manifests itself only in specific circumstances, wherein other organisms are present providing the substrates for these enzymes.
Our research led us to a completely new concept of how single-cell organisms behave. For instead of being the simple, ‘organic machines’ that they are usually considered to be, they turn out to be highly interactive and to behave more like an organized swarm.
In fact, there appears to be far less difference between monocellular and multicellular organisms than previously thought. For, just like the cells inside our own bodies, they divide functions among each other and specialize in specific processes, so the group or swarm can be far more than simply the sum of its elements.

Conclusion

These findings lead to a new experimental design for when this research can be continued. For right now, all research groups focus on discovering specific organisms in which plastic-digesting enzymes can be found. Usually, these are part of a complete agglomerate of organisms. But as soon as the specific cell type containing the enzymes has been identified, all other lifeforms in the agglomerate are being discarded.
But if we want to observe and enhance the process by which nature creates plastic digestion, we will have to analyse the entire swarm of organisms and their interactions, instead of focussing on just the one exhibiting the desired enzymes. As these may only stem from (and can only be further developed by) a multi-organism group effort.
Follow-up research to this project in the design phase.

Our partners in this project: