When Hau Nguyen describes the moment she knew her idea would work, she does not sound like someone guessing. She remembers a simple plate in the lab that made everything click. “That’s when I knew, yeah, this is going to work,” she says, describing the clear circles that showed her enzyme was degrading an opaque surrogate for plastic.
Nguyen is one of the scientists behind PAD-TIE, the Platform to Accelerate Discovery of Tailored Industrial Enzymes, a Los Alamos National Laboratory technology that won an R&D 100 award in 2025 with special recognition in green technology. PAD-TIE is not a single enzyme. It is a screening toolkit that lets researchers rapidly scan hundreds of thousands of enzyme variants to find ones that are active, stable and economical to produce. The result is a much faster path from idea to enzymes that could be used at industrial scale.
