PubMed · 2026-05-20
Scientists built an AI tool called PEPIC that can identify enzymes capable of breaking down plastics—just by reading their protein sequences. It outperformed existing methods and even flagged a previously overlooked enzyme as a candidate for degrading PET plastic.
PEPIC classified enzymes across 9 distinct plastic substrate types directly from protein sequences, outperforming state-of-the-art methods with statistically significant improvements in F1-score.
The model was trained on 181 experimentally validated enzymes and ~5,900 homologous sequences, and its highlighted amino acid residues consistently matched known catalytic and substrate-binding sites confirmed by structural modeling.
PEPIC independently identified a previously unannotated enzyme as a potential PET-degrading candidate, demonstrating its value for novel enzyme discovery.