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Is anyone else concerned about the effects this could have if it managed to get out of containment and into the wild? A self-replicating bacteria that eats plastics sounds like a potentially catastrophic event, considering how much we use them in day to day life.
Is anyone else concerned about the effects this could have if it managed to get out of containment and into the wild? A self-replicating bacteria that eats plastics sounds like a potentially catastrophic event, considering how much we use them in day to day life.
We use too much plastic, too casually, wastefully, with eventual results of microplastic and carbon release into the atmosphere. I would not weep in the least if this stuff blew around world-over and forced us to change our behaviour.
You would weep.
These microbes are surprisingly hard to scale up i.e. to make them work on large amounts of product at a time. (My wife did research on such bugs for a while). All sorts of things start happening once you have a lot of them, and the process becomes incredibly tricky to keep going.
Is anyone else concerned about the effects this could have if it managed to get out of containment and into the wild? A self-replicating bacteria that eats plastics sounds like a potentially catastrophic event, considering how much we use them in day to day life.
These microbes are surprisingly hard to scale up i.e. to make them work on large amounts of product at a time. (My wife did research on such bugs for a while). All sorts of things start happening once you have a lot of them, and the process becomes incredibly tricky to keep going.
These microbes are surprisingly hard to scale up i.e. to make them work on large amounts of product at a time. (My wife did research on such bugs for a while). All sorts of things start happening once you have a lot of them, and the process becomes incredibly tricky to keep going.
Do they get fat and lazy? [Maybe we should invent Netflix for microbes, then]
The biological pathway that makes them eat plastic is pretty card to keep activated. It's not a very profitable pathway, so the bugs tend to try eating other stuff if there is even a little available, or they are even a little outside the optimal range for eating plastic.
Is anyone else concerned about the effects this could have if it managed to get out of containment and into the wild? A self-replicating bacteria that eats plastics sounds like a potentially catastrophic event, considering how much we use them in day to day life.
Bacteria that eats nylon was first found in the wild: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylon-eating_bacteria
With this in mind, it may be worth considering that plastic-eating bacteria that currently exist in the wild do not appear to present any significant threat of a catastrophic event. I'm sure it's just an oversight on my part, but can you help me understand why this newly identified strain would pose a threat?
Have there been studies about the dangers of these types of microbes spreading out into the "wild"?
What kind of dangers and impacts would you like to see studied?
Is anyone else concerned about the effects this could have if it managed to get out of containment and into the wild? A self-replicating bacteria that eats plastics sounds like a potentially catastrophic event, considering how much we use them in day to day life.
The article implies that this microbe was found in the wild, rather than engineered in a laboratory. The paper confirms it - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2020.0040... Bacteria that eats nylon was first found in the wild: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylon-eating_bacteria With this in mind, it may be worth considering that plastic-eating bacteria that currently exist in the wild do not appear to…
I'm not concerned yet though, since current landfill sites are effectively perfect selective breeding grounds for 'plastic rot', yet so far we haven't detected any significant increase in the breakdown speeds of plastics in the environment.