Recent Trends in Omics-Based Enzyme Discovery to Combat Global Plastic Waste Crisis

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The worldwide rapidly increasing amount of plastic waste is considered a major concern in the environmental crisis today. Recycling post-consumer plastics is believed to be a viable approach to mitigate the global plastic waste challenge. Plastic recycling is considered attractive due to the reason that it could help achieve waste valorization while meeting the goals of environmental quality standards. To this end, the current research efforts are heavily focused towards developing innovative technologies for new enzyme discoveries for effective plastic waste management. Recent research has shown biocatalytic depolymerization mediated by enzymes as an efficient and sustainable alternative for plastic treatment and recycling. Using this approach, researchers have discovered different plastic-degrading enzymes that have been derived from microbial sources. Further, the concept of protein engineering has been implemented to modify and optimize plastic-degrading enzymes. In this brief opinion, we describe some of the recent trends and notable advances in mining novel plastic-degrading enzymes through cutting-edge omics-based techniques in order to improve the enzyme catalytic efficiency.