César Ramírez Sarmiento

And one friend of mine said, oh, what if they degrade plastics?

And I was like, well, that doesn't exist.

But little did I know that enzymes that could degrade plastics were being discovered.

So the first one was like in 2003 or something like that.

So that turned into my research topic when I became a professor.

So it's kind of a cool origin story, I would call it.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, there's a few.

So we have a huge fishing industry, right?

And that fishing industry, for some of the crustaceans that we're extracting from the sea, a lot of it's not consumable.

A lot of it's waste.

And then almost all of the technologies for reutilizing those waste from crustaceans are typically...

treated with like very harsh chemicals and so trying to develop new technologies using enzymes for achieving the same result which is like treating these ways for like creating fertilizers or creating other types of solutions that can be used afterwards but instead of using chemicals using enzymes that will perform the same chemical reactions but it will be like

environmentally friendly because you're using like a biological mean for that.

We have been discussing with a few colleagues in Chile that we can try to pursue.

I'm very excited about Chris Boltz, another TED fellow, his company, AI Proteins.

And what they're developing in his company is that these very, very tiny proteins, very few amino acids, right?

When you make them too short, they don't fold into like a shape.

Imagine like you had like a...

a piece of rug and you want to fold it, if it's too short, you cannot fold it, right?