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Scientists Accidentally Create Mutant Enzyme That Eats Plastic Bottles (theguardian.com)
Scientists have created a mutant enzyme that breaks down plastic drinks bottles -- by accident. The breakthrough could help solve the global plastic pollution crisis by enabling for the first time the full recycling of bottles. From a report: The new research was spurred by the discovery in 2016 of the first bacterium that had naturally evolved to eat plastic, at a waste dump in Japan. Scientists have now revealed the detailed structure of the crucial enzyme produced by the bug. The international team then tweaked the enzyme to see how it had evolved, but tests showed they had inadvertently made the molecule even better at breaking down the PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic used for soft drink bottles. "What actually turned out was we improved the enzyme, which was a bit of a shock," said Prof John McGeehan, at the University of Portsmouth, UK, who led the research. "It's great and a real finding." The mutant enzyme takes a few days to start breaking down the plastic -- far faster than the centuries it takes in the oceans. But the researchers are optimistic this can be speeded up even further and become a viable large-scale process.
If it gets loose, will it eat the bottles on the shelves? Will it also eat the fleece jackets made from recycled PET bottles?
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2368220.Mutant_59
Plastics evolve antibodies to fight off plastic-eating bacteria.
Does the enzyme release CO2, (or any other greenhouse gases), while it's breaking down the plastic?
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Teflon...
I knew nature was going to catch on eventually (long before the "thousands of years to decay" prediction) and I'm glad it has. Plastics are nice but the half-life of the products they are used in are astonishingly short. My hope is that we will be able to spray trash with a variety of monocelluar critters and it will turn it into various gases that can be harvested and used for something else. Once they have done their job, they'll leave a biosludge and elemental components like metals that can be reclaimed. The sludge will make a great fertilizer.
I hope people realize this is a good thing rather than flailing nonsensically about how their iphone is going to fall apart.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I think some people are being confused by the use of the term "mutant" in the headline. This is not a creature. It doesn't reproduce. It's a chemical. You can worry about spills, but it's never going to be a plague.
The bacteria it was derived from might become a plague, but that's an already-existing worry, since it's a naturally occurring critter which is already out there in the wild. But this is just stuff. If it "gets loose", it'll just sit there. At worst, it might contaminate the groundwater or something, but that's true of a lot of other chemicals.
Sorry, not sorry for exploiting low hanging fruit.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
“What we are hoping to do is use this enzyme to turn this plastic back into its original components, so we can literally recycle it back to plastic,” said McGeehan. “It means we won’t need to dig up any more oil and, fundamentally, it should reduce the amount of plastic in the environment.”