Rock The
Plastics!
...especially when they're tiny
12 million tons of plastic enter the ocean yearly leaching microplastics, harming both the environment and humans.
Microplastics are now found in human bloodstreams, brains, and all throughout the ecosystem.
At the same time, construction projects and dredging operations import non-renewable aggregates like sand over long distances, destroying ecosystems to fill back ditches made for projects.
We are engineering E.coli to express a fusion protein of curli fibers and carbonic anhydrase (CA). Curli fibers’ sticky properties trap the microplastics, and CA induces mineralization around it, immobilizing the plastic in calcium carbonate.
After we trap collected microplastics, our rock-like material can be used to replace nonrenewable resources such as sand.
