Comment by spockz
14 hours ago
Maybe the only thing more worrisome than microplastics everywhere is unstoppable plastics eating organisms everywhere, eating through all plastics everywhere.
14 hours ago
Maybe the only thing more worrisome than microplastics everywhere is unstoppable plastics eating organisms everywhere, eating through all plastics everywhere.
Usually these bioengineered yeasts need pretty specific growth conditions in order to eat in this case ethylene glycol, not raw finished plastic. In this case they say "plastic-derived substrates" which means they're pre-processing the waste plastic.
Good thing microorganisms are famous for their slow rate of change in dynamic environments…
I'm not sure what this adds. The yeast here is chomping ethylene glycol for carbon, and tons of soil bacteria can already do that. And I should add that highly specialized industrial/lab yeasts have existed for a long time and aren't prevalent in the environment, they just don't like to grow outside of narrow(ish) conditions. Highly prevalent wild yeasts tend to eat a variety of sugars, not glycol.
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>Usually these bioengineered yeasts need pretty specific growth conditions in order to eat
Until, say, they mutate independently. Now, I have no idea how likely that is, but I think the fear is not baseless. There's a fun SF book, "Directive 51", which explores this a bit. Not a bad book to cuddle up with.
Yeast drift a little but aren’t picking up new metabolic pathways very readily. Moreover these yeast don’t eat plastic they eat a component of PET in a bioreactor.
Of course, the lysine contingency.
> bioengineered yeasts need pretty specific growth conditions
In a natural environment this will not hold. Organisms are unstable; they change all the time, simpler ones even more so. Mutants with a faster growth rate will, up to a certain maximum, take over from slower growing or growth-deficient mutants. There isn't really a compelling growth advantage for plastic-degrading organisms, which is one reason why plastic stays so long in the environment.
All pre-processing steps further add to the cost, so we will year after year hear about it - and then wonder why nothing happens and plastics keep compounding in the ocean. And this is not new either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_v._Chakrabarty
>In a natural environment this will not hold. Organisms are unstable; they change all the time, simpler ones even more so.
Jurassic narratives notwithstanding, unsure if this is a real problem. If you have a yeast that will only survive under narrow unnatural circumstances, I would expect freeing it into the wild with natural circumstances means it dies - not uses nature to find a way to destroy the world as a form of poetic justice for ever having been created.
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Reminds me of the Taumoeba escaping the Xenonite enclosures.
Yeah, that was for plot reasons...
Perhaps soon you'll be needing to apply stains or sealants to your outdoor plastic items. Maybe even purchase treated plastic products that we worry leach toxic chemicals into their surroundings.
You already do if they sit in the sun. The UV light breaks down plastic pretty quickly.
Timescale is the important bit. If organisms degrade plastics in a few hundred years then what plastics are uniquely valuable for will be quite fine indeed.
Why is that worrisome? Might give the fish a chance whose bellies are filling up with plastic rubbish
for all the reasons in the book/movie/television show 'The Andromeda Strain'.
There’s a fantastically silly but fun book about this the name of which eludes me.
Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters, a 1971 British sci-fi environmental disaster novel written by medical scientist Kit Pedler and television screenwriter Gerry Davis.
No wikipedia page, but goodreads has it here:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/99852816-mutant-59
That wasn’t it; I just found it, it’s called Ill Wind by Kevin J Anderson
Not plastic, but 'Cats Cradle' by Kurt Vonnegut has something kind of like that.
Such as in The Andromeda Strain?
there was a time in history before fungus came along and ate trees so there were just a huge amount of trees around that couldn't decay. (which is why we have coal actually) this could be something akin to that.
I've heard that the prevailing theory now is that it wasn't the lack of fungus that made coal. Instead, the earth was covered in tropical wetlands, and trees couldn't decay in the anoxic water.
No termites either.