Researchers in the US and Britain have accidentally engineered an enzyme which eats plastic and may eventually help solve the growing problem of plastic pollution, a study said Monday.
More than eight million tons of plastic are dumped into the world's oceans every year, and concern is mounting over this petroleum-derived product's toxic legacy on human health and the environment.
Despite recycling efforts, most plastic can persist for hundreds of years in the environment, so researchers are searching for better ways to eliminate it.
Scientists at the University of Portsmouth and the US Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory decided to focus on a naturally occurring bacterium discovered in Japan a few years ago.
Japanese researchers believe the bacterium evolved fairly recently in a waste recycling centre, since plastics were not invented until the 1940s.
Known as Ideonella sakaiensis, it appears to feed exclusively on a type of plastic known as polyethylene terephthalate (PET), used widely in plastic bottles.
A useful mutation
The researchers' goal was to understand how one of its enzymes -- called PETase -- worked, by figuring out its structure.
"But they ended up going a step further and accidentally engineered an enzyme which was even better at breaking down PET plastics," said the report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed US journal.
Using a super-powerful X-ray, 10 billion times brighter than the Sun, they were able to make an ultra-high-resolution three-dimensional model of the enzyme.
Scientists from the University of South Florida and the University of Campinas in Brazil did computer modeling which showed PETase looked similar to another enzyme, cutinase, found in fungus and bacteria.
http://www.asiaone.com/world/researchers-accidentally-engineer-plastic-eating-enzyme
Plastic, for all biological purposes, is a fuel source. As soon as either an organism evolves to consume it, or we engineer one to do so, the problem will start being dealt with.
Funny how its always scientific accidents that make the biggest impacts.
We should engineer ourselves to be able to eat plastic
Scientific discoveries are less 'Eureka!' and more 'Huh... That's weird...'
Intentional engineering of PETase to increase its activity has already been reported. Unfortunately I can't access the paper cited by this news article, but in another news article the researchers say that they engineered the mutant enzyme to make it more similar to a related enzyme cutinase. Not entirely surprising that the efficiency of this enzyme can be improved further since it hasn't had all that much time to explore the evolutionary landscape available to it.
Super efficient plastic eating bacteria n the wild would majorly fuck our society though
Not necessarily.
Depending on the bacteria's lifespan, rate of proliferation, and what else sustains it, it may only end up being as "threatening" as bacteria that eat oil. It's not like the world is carpeted with plastic for these things, but there are significant problem areas where the introduction of a plastic-muncher would be incredibly valuable.
It boils down to Sci-Fi scare mongering to jump to the conclusion that it would lead to some sort of Greygoo style bacteria bloom that would destroy all plastics as we know it, especially when we can handle much more deadly, much more readily proliferating bacteria like disease causing germs with relative success.
Depends. If the bacteria requires large amounts of water for example (a very likely scenario as the organism will probably originate from the sea) then the bacteria won't propagate on land very easily, and when it does, it will move slowly. It's also likely to evolve to eat only one type or plastic, not every plastic, further hindering it's spread. We may even decide to include fungicides or bactericides in non-disposable and easily recycled plastic objects like furniture, car parts etc, but not include them in disposable plastics like cups, bags and straws.
If we can include this enzyme into ocean dwelling bacteria or algae we can do a one two punch for the oceans of not only cleaning up the great garbage patch but bolster the food chain (especially with the problem of over fishing in some markets).
It should be noted that PET plastic only compromises about ~10% of most marine plastic waste, where the remaining bulk is primarily polypropylene or polyethylene. So if we can find more enzymes to eat these plastics the better as PP and PE are generally chemically more inert than PET.
Isnt the real question can we make another one? Can they be mass produced?
Why wouldn't we be able to breed this culture?
I can't verify how true that is, but I do know that's what wood used to be like. When trees first started growing, nothing could eat wood, only leaves. Trees died, and nothing ate them, they didn't decompose, they just piled up. Entire forests worth of dead trees just laying around in a stasis, as the winds blew dirt over them and they were buried and crushed by rock from the shifting earth. These crushed forests eventually became coal.
A similar thing happened to microorganisms in the ocean, they died en-masse and became buried by mud and rock and turned into petroleum.
We already can but the plastics mega-corporations make trillions of dollars a year by selling and distributing their products to assembly lines across the globe - namely China, Taiwan and Mexico. You really think they're going sit back and watch their stocks plummet because people can now realize that they're able to consume and digest plastic? Of course not, they're going to bite back hard. They're going to make sure every single person on this planet knows not to fuck with them. As long as those so called "choking hazard" warnings; those "for ages six and up" bullshit lies appear on our food products and the toys we buy for our children; as long as they can make us believe their lies that we can't eat plastic, this country will continue to be their pathetic puppets.
Wake up, sheeple!
I'm really not sure why I wrote this stupid joke, please send help.
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