Genetically Engineered Plastic Munching Microbes: Recent Advancements and Perspectives

The discovery of the plastic-degrading microbes has unveiled new avenues for addressing the global plastic pollution crisis and possess the potential to revolutionize waste management practices. Microorganisms possess substantial potential to facilitate a more sustainable plastic economy through processes like biodegradation and enzymatic recycling of polymers. With the advent of gene editing tools, the field of molecular biology introduced innovative methods to precisely integrate foreign genes into specific genomic locations in various microorganisms, addressing the numerous challenges linked with existing methods. Recently, gene targeting methods involving zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs), transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs), and clustered regularly interspaced short palindrome repeats (CRISPR) have gained prominence. This chapter concentrates on diverse strategies for production of degrading enzymes, synthetic biology, metabolic engineering, and gene targeting, which offer promising solutions to plastic waste management.