Take that Greenies: Plastic Eating Bacteria! By James Reed
Although I am largely scientific illiterate, I can see the relevance of some new discoveries, and how the technology will have political ramifications. I know just enough to see that we live in a world, hugely influenced by the technocrats. We have shown this at the blog with the Covid plandemic, and also, ongoing with AI. This is mostly negative stuff, but there are some good developments too.
As we know, one of the big things from the Australian Greens, especially at the state levels, was to get plastic spoons and shopping bags banned. This was supposedly to deal with the problem of plastic in the environment. It was pushed through even though supermarkets had moved to recycled plastic bags. And as well, what sort of dolphin would choke to death on a plastic spoon? The ban was just another feel-good move that never addressed the fact that more microplastics enter the environment from necessary industrial processes than ever get there by the useful shopping bags.
However, bacteria to the rescue. Researchers have discovered a plastic-easting E. coli bacteria which can turn PET plastic into adipic acid, which can be used in industry. This process, the details of which are beyond me, would deal with the mountains of plastic drink containers, which as I understand it, are recycled in some states anyway. But it may be economically more efficient to just break down the bottles.
In any case, if such a plastic-eating bacteria exist, perhaps others can be found, or constructed in the bioweapons labs of the world, as something beneficial for humanity for a change. As a great fan of plastic, this I welcome.
“Mountains of used plastic bottles get thrown away every day, but microbes could potentially tackle this problem. Now, researchers report in ACS Central Science that they've developed a plastic-eating E. coli that can efficiently turn polyethylene terephthalate (PET) waste into adipic acid, which is used to make nylon materials, drugs and fragrances.
Previously, a team of researchers including Stephen Wallace engineered a strain of E. coli to transform the main component in old PET bottles, terephthalic acid, into something tastier and more valuable: the vanilla flavor compound vanillin. At the same time, other researchers engineered microbes to metabolize terephthalic acid into a variety of small molecules, including short acids.
So, Wallace and a new team from the University of Edinburgh wanted to expand E. coli's biosynthetic pathways to include the metabolism of terephthalic acid into adipic acid, a feedstock for many everyday products that's typically generated from fossil fuels using energy-intensive processes.
The team developed a new E. coli strain that produced enzymes that could transform terephthalic acid into compounds such as muconic acid and adipic acid. Then, to transform the muconic acid into adipic acid, they used a second type of E. coli, which produced hydrogen gas, and a palladium catalyst.
In experiments, the team found that attaching the engineered microbial cells to alginate hydrogel beads improved their efficiency, and up to 79% of the terephthalic acid was converted into adipic acid.
Using real-world samples of terephthalic acid from a discarded bottle and a coating taken from waste packaging labels, the engineered E. coli system efficiently produced adipic acid. In the future, the researchers say they will look for pathways to biosynthesize additional higher-value products.”
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acscentsci.3c00414
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