Lara Pfaff, Jian Gao, Zhishuai Li, Anna Jäckering, Gert Weber, Jan Mican, Yinping Chen, Weiliang Dong, Xu Han, Christian G. Feiler, Yu-Fei Ao, Christoffel P. S. Badenhorst, David Bednar, Gottfried J. Palm, Michael Lammers, Jiri Damborsky, Birgit Strodel, Weidong Liu*, Uwe T. Bornscheuer*, Ren Wei*
Polyethylene terephthalate (PET), the most abundant synthetic polyester, is widely used in the packaging and textile industries. The global production of PET recently reached 82 million metric tons per year. This contributes significantly to the global solid waste stream and environmental plastic pollution. Two highly similar thermophilic PET hydrolases were structurally resolved in complex with their ligand and these structures were used for exploring substrate binding modes by molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. Finally, we generated PES-H1 variants with significantly improved activity on both amorphous Goodfellow PET (Gf-PET) films and pretreated postconsumer (‘real-world’) PET waste. These variants outperformed previously known enzymes.