That's a far cry from the Blight:
From the Plymouth Novella
"What's this?" She pointed at an angular shape inside the cell.
"We don't know exactly, but it isn't natural. We think it's what makes this thing reproduce at its fantastic rate, gives it the metabolism to tear apart rock like tissue-paper."
She licked her upper lip. "There were references in some of the Earth databases to 'accelerated cells,' organic cells with some of their internal machinery replaced with real machinery of the manmade variety, self-replicating of course. The experiments were very secret, and no details were available in any of the literature I was able to access."
The "internal machinery replaced with real machinery of the manmade variety" bit should have been worded in a less silly way, but the overall concept of engineering artificial organelles, enzymes, or whatever other biomolecular structures, which are vastly more efficient and effective than anything that exists in nature, is plenty plausible.
As far as what the article is talking about is concerned, though, we're just talking about a newly-discovered enzyme that breaks down polymers of polyethylene terephthalate:
(We really need a way to have white backgrounds for transparent images like this)This isn't even remotely close to being the most complex organic molecule ever, so this enzyme isn't the most complicated enzyme to ever have evolved, either. It was only a matter of time until microbes started evolving enzymes like this, really. We've been dumping metric shit tons of plastics into the environment, which gives microbes ample opportunity to come into contact with them.
