The Ellington lab maintains a keen interest in how to best remediate the glut of manmade materials in the environment. In particular, we have ongoing efforts to biomine plastic-degrading enzymes from a variety of sources, including from high temperature microbial communities (with Brett Baker, MSI) and from insect sources (with Ed Marcotte, Kasia Dinkeloo, and the Freshman Research Initiative). Coupled with continuing efforts to develop machine learning methods to support protein engineering, this has led to the discovery of a variety of enzymes for the 'green' degradation of plastics at scale (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04599-z). We now seek to use the degradation products for resynthesis, including of novel 'sequence-specific' plastics (with Eric Anslyn, in Chemistry).

Associated Lab Members:

Daniel J Acosta