ArticleScience advances2025
Ancestral reconstruction of polyethylene terephthalate degrading cutinases reveals a rugged and unexplored sequence-fitness landscape.
Article in Science advances, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Graph-based representations in modern protein science.The Biochemical journal · 2026Review
- Deciphering the evolutionary origin of the enantioselectivity of short-chain dehydrogenases from plants toward 1-borneol.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Structure-Guided Extremophile Genome Mining Expands the PETase Landscape and Reveals PET-Hydrolysing True Lipase Lineages.Microbial biotechnology · 2026Article
- Engineering and Application of a Thermostable MHETase for PET Depolymerization.ACS sustainable chemistry & engineering · 2026Article
- Disordered N-termini enhance the thermostability of SGNH-hydrolase family polyesterases.Protein science : a publication of the Protein Society · 2026Article
- Machine Learning-Guided Identification of PET Hydrolases from Natural Diversity.ACS catalysis · 2025Article
- Investigating the determinants of performance in machine learning for protein fitness prediction.Protein science : a publication of the Protein Society · 2025Article
- Synthetic and Engineering Biology in Australia: Advances in Infrastructure, Coordination and Impact.Engineering biologyReview
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The use of protein engineering to generate enzymes for the degradation of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is a promising route for plastic recycling, yet traditional engineering approaches often fail to explore protein sequence space for optimal enzymes. In this work, we use multiplexed ancestral sequence reconstruction (mASR) to address this, exploring the evolutionary sequence space of PET-degrading cutinases. Using 20 statistically equivalent phylogenies of the bacterial cutinase family, we generated 48 ancestral sequences revealing a wide range of PETase activities, highlighting the value of mASR in uncovering functional variants. Our findings show PETase activity can evolve through multiple pathways involving mutations remote from the active site. Moreover, analyzing the PETase fitness landscape with local ancestral sequence embedding (LASE) revealed that LASE can capture sequence features linked to PETase activity. This work highlights mASR's potential in exploration of sequence space and underscores the use of LASE in readily mapping the protein fitness landscapes.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.