PAZy: an expanded and actively maintained database of experimentally validated plastic-active enzymes

The Plastics-Active Enzyme Database (PAZy) is a manually curated resource for enzymes experimentally shown to act on synthetic or bio-based plastics. It was developed to distinguish experimentally verified plastics-active enzymes from computationally predicted or insufficiently supported candidates. Here, we present an expanded version of PAZy, implemented as a relational database containing >450 plastics-active enzymes with more detailed metadata, broader substrate coverage, and large language model-assisted curation of activity data. The redesigned web interface now enables browsing by protein or plastic substrate, detailed inspections of individual protein entries as well as programmatic access through a public representational state transfer (REST) application programming interface (API). This functionality enables scientists to freely implement PAZy into their own research workflows. By using evidence-based manual curation, PAZy provides a high-confidence resource for both comparative analyses and enzyme discovery in the rapidly growing field of enzymatic plastic degradation. PAZy is freely available at https://www.pazy.eu.