What does it excrete? I’m curious.
Edit: The bacterium will eventually convert the plastic into carbon dioxide and water. That’s both expected and somewhat disappointing.
Metabolism is just fire but slower IIRC
True, but it also depends on the enzymes capabilities to break things down into their smallest components.
You'd prefer they excreted gasoline and matches?
what the plastic is made of. so any molecule that contains C, H (and atoms like O and S F or N depending on the type of plastic) can be synthesized by plastic eating bacteria. so we can also make oil and fuel from it
The article states it’s ingesting Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET), (C10H8O4)n
Aren't all humans full of microplastics?
Not just humans, IIRC micro plastics can be found in the most remote parts of the planet such as uninhabited areas of Antarctica.
Everything is, it has saturated the water cycle and is everywhere the water cycle reaches. (water cycle reaches everywhere)
Bunch of people in Hollywood getting really nervous right now.
This is so great and so bad at the same time. We're gonna have to go back to using tar and shit for things we actually want to last. That's not going to be cheap...
I mean, wood already biodegrades quite readily, yet we are able to make some pretty long lasting things out of it anyway. Having a bacteria that can break down some variety of plastic doesn't really imply that all plastic things are going to rot away like old fruit.
Is this a false equivalence?
Is the rate at which wood rots indicative of how quickly plastic would rot?
Also plastic tends to be very thin. Like if bacteria can denature 0.1mm per year that's lots of years for a timber beam but a few months for plastic packaging.
Tar is very problematic health-wise. Banned in some countries for this reason.
A moment of silence for people with plastic surgery
Reposting my old comment
Here's a thing I often think about.Somewhen long, long time ago trees existed, but there were no microorganisms or fungi which could break apart wood, so for some 60 millions of years land was littered with unrotten trees.Until these microorganisms and fungi came into existence and started to feast. That event made wood a perishable material, and people now have to treat wood in different ways in order to show down its decay.Currently, humanity relies on plastics. And one large advantage of plastics is that they are, well, effectively non perishable. At the same time, humanity actively creates microorganisms that would be able to do what nature learned to do to wood.If Michael Crichton taught us anything, it's the impossibility of containing such organisms in the lab. So I think it's fairly reasonable to say that humanity will face with natural plastic rot within the next hundred years.Am I mad?Can you imagine challenges that will bring? Think checking every plastic bit of an airplane? A car? A ship?
We used other stuff before we had plastic and material science is still evolving. Latex glove and condoms still works. And stuff made from hard plastic could be made from metals, or some form of resin instead. Hell we didn't stop using wood we learned to treat it to be more resistant.
Plus we have an issue of plastic everywhere. Maybe in the future it would be interesting to avoid using material that get everywhere and can't be recycled.
I wouldn't worry too much about that. Plastic already degrades to a point of not being useful - it just sticks around in a way that is harmful.
Sunlight does a number on it, and it's not very abrasion resistant. It's also not great at weight bearing. We'll be ok, and if anything, better off if something breaks down plastic (as long as the byproduct excreted isn't just as bad or worse).
It probably only eats a specific type of plastic. There are tons of different plastics all formulated differently, some could be toxic to the bacteria.
Agree, but also the nature will find the way 🥰
Could we consider this to be a dilemma of preservation?
Let’s take something innocuous and specific, like a package of food. We want it to be airtight and safe from bacteria until a human tears it open and eats it. But once torn open, we want it to disintegrate.
Now, if we make this bacteria and allow it to spread, the same problem exists as if we were to package that food in a wooden container, or a paper container. The material is now “weak” to ambient attackers.
Arm the site nuke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain
Oh no, my balls
A tale of how a plastic eating bacteria moonlighted as a flesh eating one.
If we play our cards right, we could have a real-life Andromeda Strain.
I've read that book, didn't end well for that civilization.
The planet was happy though.This one took me a few seconds.
Invented makes it sound like they came up with it from scratch. It's more likely they bred one or bioengineered one.
