Microplastic pollution is one of Toronto’s most urgent yet invisible environmental threats, accumulating across waterways, soils, and even drinking systems. To confront this, our student team is developing a breakthrough biotechnology platform that discovers and engineers enzymes capable of breaking down PET (polyethylene terephthalate) microplastics in real‑world environments and not just idealized lab conditions.

Working with the RNAlab at the University of Toronto, we created PETAdex, now the world’s largest open‑source database of plastic‑degrading enzymes. Before our work, only ~2,000 such enzymes were known globally. Using planetary‑scale genome assembly (LOGAN), we uncovered 215.7 million candidate enzymes - a 100,000‑fold expansion of the known landscape. PETAdex gives researchers unprecedented visibility into global enzymatic diversity and dramatically accelerates machine‑learning‑driven enzyme discovery.

From this resource, we identified two enzymes that degrade PET microplastics faster than FAST‑PETase, the current industry benchmark. Our engineered enzymes generate 4× more terephthalic acid (TPA), indicating faster and more complete PET depolymerization.

Our goal is to build a scalable platform capable of discovering and optimizing enzymes for any environment, wastewater plants, rivers, lakes, and eventually for all major microplastics (PE, PP, PS). This project positions Toronto as a leader in sustainable biotechnology and lays the foundation for a viable solution to complete plastics disposal, eliminating environmental toxicity and advancing a circular bioeconomy.

This grant will help us prototype pioreactors and purchase wet‑lab reagents to test enzyme performance under real‑world conditions. With community support, we can transform Toronto into an advanced bioengineering hub for next‑generation environmental solutions.