Team:Pasteur Paris


What if plastic could cure people?

Today, scientists are looking for new ways to synthesize drugs. As one of the major pollutants, plastic waste is a growing resource with 25 million tons produced in 2014, in Europe alone. Because of their composition, plastics have a very slow degradation rate and produce persistent organic pollutants. This leads to an increase of plastic pollution and an accumulation of plastic microparticles in our ecosystem, especially in the oceans. PlastiCure is a biological system designed in E. coli to degrade polyethylene terephthalate and use the degradation products to synthesize a commonly used antibiotic: Erythromycin A. For this, exogenous DNA sequences are integrated in multiple operons to express the biodegradation pathway (22kb) and the biosynthesis pathway (55kb). PlastiCure is a very innovative project to address an environmental issue, plastic pollution, by degrading plastic into a profitable transformation product and thus increase efforts in plastic recycling.








Every year, the world’s plastic production increases. In 2013, 299 million tons of plastic were produced throughout the world. However, recovery and recycling remain insufficient, and millions of tons end up in landfills, contribution to plastic pollution.
PlastiCure is a biological system designed to degrade PET, one of the most commonly used plastic, and use the degradation products to synthesize Erythromycin A.
Here, you can find our Notebook, the results, and the modeling of our system.
This is where you can see which Biobricks, chassis organism and cells we used during the iGEM competition. There is detailed information about every part we used : their name, their natural function and how we used them in our project PlastiCure.
During iGEM, we met scientists, journalists, politicians that helped us and gave us tips. This chapter is where you’ll find every collaborations that we participated in, the mettings that we attended in during the summer.
Description in construction


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