Uploaded December 2025 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago

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Globally, plastic production has surpassed 8 billion tons, however, less than 10% has been recycled. Plastic has replaced other materials such as wood, metal, and glass due to low production costs, with production continuing at a rapid rate of over 400 million tons per year. However, recycling costs for plastic remain high necessitating the development of new recycling technologies. Over the last decade, plastic-degrading enzymes have become a rich area of biotechnology discovery. In this webinar, we will demonstrate how to use RCSB PDB tools to explore structures of plastic-degrading enzymes. These tools and the underlying PDB data are critical for advancing the biotechnologies of plastic recycling.

Additional resources for this webinar can be found at pdb101.rcsb.org/train/training-events/plastic-degrading-enzymes

Video Guide:
00:00 Introduction to PDB Archive and RCSB.org
04: 53 Introduction to Plastic Degrading Enzymes
09: 29 Using RCSB.org to Explore Plastic Degrading Enzymes

Tools Used:
11: 24 Advanced Search
23:23 Sequence Annotations
36:56 Pairwise Structure Alignment