Swedish scientists have established that microbes in the oceans and soil around the world have evolved and started to destroy plastic. About this пишет The Guardian.
Researchers studied about 200 million genes in DNA samples taken from the environment and found 30 thousand different enzymes that can break down ten different types of plastic.
Soil samples were taken from 169 places in 38 countries and 11 different habitats, and they contained 18 enzymes that decompose plastic.
Scientists have declared that almost 60% of new enzymes do not fit into any of the known classes, that is, they are unknown to science.
"We did not expect to find such a large number of enzymes in such a large number of different microbes and habitats. This is an amazing discovery that really illustrates the scale of the problem," said Professor Jan Zrymek.
