New essay: There is a little-known regulation that has been strangling biotech innovation for decades. Engineered microbes that eat plastic, sense landmines, or destroy toxins? None are likely to be approved soon, even if proven safe and effective. This regulation, called the Toxic Substances Control Act, is a black hole: between 1987 and 2018, researchers filed more than 240 applications to release engineered microbes outside of the laboratory, such as to clean up oil spills or degrade plastic. Only a few have ever been approved for use. (Interestingly, the Act itself, as passed by Congress, doesn’t even mention biology! It was designed to regulate chemicals, and bureaucrats only later clumped biology into it.) Without reform, many of the world’s most useful microbes will never find use outside of the laboratory, even if they are proven safe and effective. Here's one example: In 2016, for example, Japanese researchers discovered a microbe that is able to digest PET, the plastic in water bottles and most polyester clothing. These wild microbes had taken an existing protein that degrades cutin (the waxy material on plant leaves) and evolved it to eat plastic instead. But natural forms of the PET-eating enzymes are slow; when the microbes were cultured on top of a thin PET film and incubated at 30 degrees centigrade, it took them six weeks to break it down. Engineers in Texas, then, took these PET-eating enzymes and used computational tools to make an improved variant, called FAST-PETase. This enzyme is 98 percent identical to the natural version but digests PET plastics in less than 24 hours. They could put FAST-PETase back into living cells and release them onto landfills. But unfortunately, such an organism would likely be rejected by regulators. Read more: worksinprogress.co/issue/all…