FIGURE 2.

Comprehensive workflow for the identification of plastic degrading enzymes. New plastic degrading enzymes can be found by (A) environmental screening of interesting strains (green arrows) and (B) the computational methods (magenta arrows). In the case of computational methods, the enzymes need to be expressed in a suitable expression system (2) before high throughput enzyme assays can be performed. Via high throughput enzymatic assays, active strains/enzymes can be pinpointed. For the strains isolated via environmental screening, the specific enzymes need to be identified (2). The enzymes can then be further characterized to identify potential targets for enzyme optimization approaches. The protein depicted in this figure is based on PDB ID 6ANE (Fecker et al., 2018).