Chemistry researchers develop a protein capable of eliminating microplastics

(© Image: Depositphotos) - From November 13 to 19, the third Global Plastics Treaty Meeting was held in Nairobi (Kenya), which tried, albeit in vain, to find an agreement to hold "countries and companies accountable for their action, or inaction, on plastic pollution and its impact on our health, environment and economy". World leaders have set themselves a date to further discuss the issue in April 2024 in Ottawa, Canada, but in the meantime, plastics and microplastics continue to produce pollution, primarily in waters around the globe. Among the possible solutions, beyond reduction, is to find a method that destroys these plastics, something in which researchers from the Faculty of Chemical Sciences, who have designed, in collaboration with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and the Institute of Catalysis of the CSIC, protein nanopores for the capture and degradation of microplastics. Professors Sara García Linares and Élvaro Martínez del Pozo, from the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology of the Faculty of Chemical Sciences, are two of the authors of the work, which has been published, after several exhaustive reviews, in Nature Catalysis . Both are also members of the "Structure-Function in Proteins" research group, which Martínez del Pozo himself directs, and whose decades of research have led to this promising result. Sara García Linares explains that the Barcelona group, which specializes in bioinformatics, has created software that combines prediction algorithms and artificial intelligence.