[HN Gopher] Scientists identify microbe that could help degrade ...
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Scientists identify microbe that could help degrade polyurethane-
based plastics
Author : dnetesn
Score : 149 points
Date : 2020-03-27 10:55 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| ilitirit wrote:
| Have there been studies about the dangers of these types of
| microbes spreading out into the "wild"?
| Kalium wrote:
| As a lay person, I currently get the distinct impression that
| polymer-digesting microbes are not currently considered
| dangerous, with the current impacts being negligible.
|
| What kind of dangers and impacts would you like to see studied?
| ilitirit wrote:
| > I currently get the distinct impression that polymer-
| digesting microbes are not currently considered dangerous,
| with the current impacts being negligible.
|
| Well, you've just answered it. I would like to know the
| scientific rationale for this or an opposing belief. I
| currently have no opinion on the matter because I haven't
| read any material to think about in any way other than "these
| things exist".
| funklute wrote:
| The article talks about a microbe that already exists in the
| wild.
| ilitirit wrote:
| I'm not referring to this article - I'm referring to the
| general case of plastic-eating microbes. Plastic eating
| organisms are not new. Even certain types of mealworms will
| eat styrofoam...
|
| Articles like these are published several times a year, but I
| don't think I've seen any studies on the potential impact.
|
| This article mentions it, but there are no accompanying
| references.
|
| http://theconversation.com/how-plastic-eating-bacteria-
| actua...
| imtringued wrote:
| They are probably as dangerous as silverfish to your book
| collection.
| droffel wrote:
| 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.
| seph-reed wrote:
| My friends and I played a card game in which the point was to
| write a short story. Our story was like so:
|
| Planet Earth had been evacuated, and all that was left was
| little robots. All of different types, performing different
| jobs, but with one major function: to rid the world of a
| microbe that turned all organic matter into crude oil.
| Initially this microbe was developed for plastics, but it got
| out of hand really quickly.
|
| Now, given the world was entirely covered, clean up was an
| impossible task, so most of the robots just gave up and "zenned
| out." They'd go into an infinite loop of impossibility and stay
| there. Our robots were a bit different and instead decided to
| just pretend to work.
|
| Eventually a catastrophic change happened wherin a small comet
| hit the Earth. Then growing from that point, all of the sludge
| began to crystalize. These crystals grew like plague, so any
| robot that became even an little bit glinty was sure to be a
| goner soon.
|
| The story ended with all our robots dying, having learned that
| humanity had sent the crystalizing thing, but also having seen
| greenery grow once again where the crystals had cleaned up.
| serf wrote:
| a plastic eating pathogen is a prominent actor in 'The
| Andromeda Strain'
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain
| joshuaheard wrote:
| My first thought. My second thought was a terrorist releasing
| this in a hospital.
| tigermelon wrote:
| grey goo scenario :)
| Kalium wrote:
| 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 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?
| londons_explore wrote:
| By selectively breeding them to be more efficient at breaking
| down plastics faster, one might be increasing the risk of a
| runaway 'plastic-rot'.
|
| 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.
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| Yup. The whole reason we use plastic for everything is because
| it's cheap and mostly inert (i.e. doesn't break down in the
| environment). If plastic starts rotting we are going to be in
| for a really bad time. It's difficult to even imagine the cost
| of all the damage. Seems like we're a decently far way off from
| that point though.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| It pains me to think about all the plastic items I've bought
| over the years that weren't up to the task; degraded in the
| sun to the point of failure; or otherwise ended up in
| landfill.
|
| Ideally any bacteria, or other microbes, would only breakdown
| plastics under certain conditions, probably in some kind of
| bioreactor.
| webreac wrote:
| A bactery that eat oil and you have the movie mad max
| Rescis wrote:
| There are cureently bacteria that eat diesel/gasoline, which
| is why if you leave either in your vehicle tank for a long
| period (1-6 months) , you shoud to siphon it out and replace
| it.
| serf wrote:
| No.
|
| Gasoline and diesel go bad because they are solutions of
| many hydrocarbons, and the lighter hydrocarbons are the
| first to evaporate, leaving a heavier-than-intended slurry
| of what's left plus accrued moisture from atmosphere.
|
| It has little to nothing to do with bacterial growth.
|
| 'Fuel Stabilizer', additives that are intended to be added
| to tanks of vehicles which must have fuel sitting in them
| for prolonged periods, are oils which are designed to
| prevent the evaporation of the lighter hydrocarbons and
| prevent water infiltration; usually through the use of
| molecules that either bond with water readily, or by
| layering oil atop the fuel mass to encapsulate it from
| evaporation to atmosphere.
| exhilaration wrote:
| _leaving a heavier-than-intended slurry of what 's left
| plus accrued moisture from atmosphere_
|
| You didn't mention ethanol but that's what you mean.
| Normal gasoline is very stable, it's just the federally-
| mandated corn ethanol added to it that turns into sludge
| after a few months. Fuel stabilizer keeps that ethanol
| from degrading.
|
| I would advise anyone with small engines, like lawnmowers
| or snowblowers, to seek out ethanol-free gasoline and use
| that exclusively in those engines.
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| 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.
| shawnz wrote:
| Some usages of plastics are essential. What about in medicine
| for example?
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| Right, exactly. A runaway bacterium that ate medical
| equipment, electronic equipment, industrial equipment,
| vehicles, food packaging... that would be a Bad Thing. It
| would mean an end to much of the modern world.
|
| I'm reminded of a reddit discussion on how awful it would
| be if a coronal mass ejection event destroyed all
| electronics on Earth. They were lamenting how tragic the
| loss of Netflix would be given the current lock-down,
| oblivious to that it would presumably result in society
| collapsing, with millions or billions dying in the ensuing
| famine.
| imtringued wrote:
| Bacteria fail to eat our organic wooden houses.
| tryptophan wrote:
| Thats because the wood is treated with lots of chemicals.
| We would need to start treating plastics with these
| chemicals, creating potentially toxic plastics, which is
| not a good thing because it is very hard to test
| chemicals for toxicity and much of our food is stored in
| plastics.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Most of the wood used in house construction is not
| treated with anything. Only the stuff that touches soil,
| foundations, or is exposed to elements is. Unless you use
| real wood siding, that'll be less than 5% of all lumber
| used. It doesnt decay, because it's kept dry, and
| microorganisms arent very good at decomposing dry wood.
| sgc wrote:
| Sure they do, it's a major repair bill for many people.
| If we wind up with critical infrastructure that was
| previously stable randomly rotting, it will likely
| disrupt our current uptime rates, require expensive
| preventative measures and repairs, and in the end limit
| access to services due to the added costs. The dangers of
| hidden rot to electrical lines in buildings is one of the
| scariest possibilities.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| What's your point? We're talking about a hypothetical.
| ip26 wrote:
| On the one hand I understand what you are saying, but on
| the other hand we've only had good plastics for a couple
| decades.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| That's not relevant. We know it's possible to build a
| society with no plastics, but the question is how much
| harm it would do if plastics suddenly started to rapidly
| decay.
|
| We've only had widespread electronics for a handful of
| decades, but if we lost it overnight, we'd be unable to
| produce and distribute food at the necessary scale.
| Restoring the global economy wouldn't even be on the
| horizon, we'd be too busy dying of famine.
|
| We've only had the internal combustion engine for a
| handful of decades, but if we lost it overnight we'd be
| similarly ruined.
|
| If the bacteria only slowly ate plastics, we wouldn't be
| doomed, it would just make things more costly, as with
| way rust and rot.
| narag wrote:
| Water, gas, sewage, electricity and telecom lines are
| conducted/coated with PET.
|
| You would weep.
| baq wrote:
| you sir have won the understatement of the thread award.
|
| i'd literally be flooded with shit if something ate my
| plumbing, which likely means dead. that is, unless the
| isolation of electric cabling wouldn't burn me alive first.
|
| weep isn't really on the TODO list in that scenario. covid
| is peanuts in comparison.
| TausAmmer wrote:
| Just like woo flu
| baggy_trough wrote:
| It would be wasteful to have to replace almost all vehicles,
| appliances, computers, and so on.
| holoduke wrote:
| I think you generalize it too much. There are many different
| plastics with many different properties. Some will degrade in
| a few years, others take a thousand years. Some degrade to
| micro particles floating in our seas for a long time. Others
| do not and can be even eaten.
| wlll wrote:
| I once read a sci-fi book that featured a metal eating organism
| that was released as a weapon.
|
| Yeah, whenever humans engineer something to fix something else
| we've broken in the complex system that is earth, it seems like
| there's a high chance of it messing other stuff up and itself
| becoming a problem.
| funklute wrote:
| If you bothered to actually read the article, you'd see that
| this is a microbe that already exists in the wild.
| droffel wrote:
| I imagine the plan is to engineer it to increase its potency.
| It's clearly not at a dangerous/critical point in its current
| form.
| dmos62 wrote:
| Extremely rapidly degrading plastics would still be a
| better situation than extremely slowly degrading plastics.
| xwkd wrote:
| It might have been better to say, "In the article, they say
| that this is a microbe that already exists in the wild."
|
| Your words make you sound rude, though you may not have meant
| to be.
| funklute wrote:
| Thank you, I'm quite aware that it made me sound rude.
|
| I don't think that hypothetical scare-mongering is very
| useful in this context. Especially not when it risks mis-
| representing what the article was actually about. Then it
| just contributes to the kind of information noise you can
| find many other places on the internet.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| The HN site guidelines ask us to be kind:
|
| _Be kind. Don 't be snarky. Have curious conversation;
| don't cross-examine. Comments should get more thoughtful
| and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more
| divisive._
|
| And to specifically _not do_ what you've done here:
|
| _Please don 't comment on whether someone read an
| article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions
| that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."_
|
| If a comment inspires you to say something insightful or
| interesting, say it. Otherwise maybe don't.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| ryanianian wrote:
| Don't assume someone hasn't read the article. It currently
| exists in the wild but states only that scientists "managed
| to isolate a bacterium", indicating that it is not abundant
| and likely not capable of working at a large scale. The
| obvious question of "what happens when [the industrial
| version of] this gets out" is a reasonable one that the
| article doesn't even address.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| Wood is easily degradable under the right conditions, but that
| isn't a major problem for us. I'm almost certain, for example,
| that 99% of plastic in use today is in environments that are
| too dry for bacteria.
| c22 wrote:
| Of course the places where plastic is used specifically
| _because_ it doesn 't rot in damp environments probably
| include some of its more critical deployments.
| peteradio wrote:
| I used to think about that, but there really isn't that much
| plastic to sustain something like that. I know it might seem
| like there is tons and tons of plastic around and blowing in
| the wind and in our oceans, but the amount needed for a
| "infection" of this microbe to take hold would need to be many
| orders of magnitude higher.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| You don't have to see it, for microbes to find it. We are
| aware that those tiny spheres of plastic made for facial
| scrubs, are now everywhere including Antarctica, right? So a
| microbe that can eat that, will find ready food everywhere,
| on every continent?
| mrob wrote:
| It's not the mass of plastic, but the surface area.
| Microplastics have very high surface area to mass ratio, so
| large numbers of microbes have access to them. I expect to
| see rotting plastics in my lifetime. But this isn't
| necessarily a disaster. Many uses (e.g. food packaging) are
| still possible with biodegradable plastics, and for critical
| things like medical equipment we have fluorinated plastics,
| which are very resistant to anything a microbe could do. For
| everything else we'll just have to revert to wood and metal.
| This will mean paying more attention to repair and
| maintenance, and less disposable products.
| vervez wrote:
| Another possibility: the bacteria could be engineered to switch
| to a different metabolic mechansim, like the use of the lac
| operon to digest lactose instead of glucose whenever there's a
| scarcity of glucose. Although this envisages stably engineered
| bacteria that switch between plastic and regular metabolic
| process, which I'm not sure about the current
| feasibility/precision.
| amelius wrote:
| Just wash your hands before touching your AirPods :)
| rseed42 wrote:
| Guess they haven't read some science fiction classics :)
|
| Mutant 59 The Plastic Eater Book by Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler
| grandinj wrote:
| 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.
| lolive wrote:
| Do they get fat and lazy? [Maybe we should invent Netflix for
| microbes, then]
| ajross wrote:
| In a sense. They're highly specialized organisms with
| relatively inefficient metabolisms. They do great in an
| environment filled with just them and their food. But in an
| environment filled with other organic material (like their
| own bodies) they get outcompeted pretty badly by more
| conventional microbes.
| grandinj wrote:
| (Paraphrasing because of my limited understanding of what my
| wife did)
|
| 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.
| highfrequency wrote:
| Interesting stuff, would love to hear more intuition about
| why this is difficult. Is it just that we haven't found an
| economical pathway for metabolizing plastics, or is there a
| fundamental reason why one should not exist?
|
| Hydrocarbons have an energy density 2-3x higher than
| glucose, so naively it seems like there should be a
| profitable metabolic pathway!
| Ductapemaster wrote:
| As a basic analogy, think of it like human metabolism
| burning fat vs. carbohydrates. Fat is much more energy
| dense, but until you starve the body of carbohydrates,
| your body won't burn it. This pathway likely exists as a
| "backup" metabolic system so that in the absence of easy-
| to-digest feedstocks, the microbe can still live, but at
| an energetic cost.
| zinclozenge wrote:
| Hydrocarbons are extremely stable, which means it
| requires a large energy input to break them up.
|
| The article doesn't go into a lot of detail, but my guess
| is that the bacteria can break up the carbamate links.
| elcritch wrote:
| Wonder if CRISPR or similar could be used to knock out
| regular metabolism pathways. Seems like they'd be
| understood enough to do so effectively.
| Supermancho wrote:
| Once those microbes become efficient, say goodbye to
| specific plastics as a durable material for regular use.
| The microbes wouldn't know the difference between trash
| and in-use material.
| mr-ron wrote:
| Pretty sure they alude to that in Ringworld
| GenerocUsername wrote:
| Unless the metabolic pathway requires some super-specific
| and limited resource, thus garbage facilities could
| supply the catalyst and the microbes would begin
| consuming the plastics.
|
| Essentially none would survive outside designated plastic
| eating situations.
|
| Until ... life finds a way ...
| elcritch wrote:
| Given that this pathway is inefficient and plastics
| aren't an inefficient food mechanism it seems likely even
| without a specific limiter it'd be hard for the bacteria
| to spread widely. Similar to the bacteria that termites
| host which decompose cellulose. But then again maybe
| plastic eating termites would co-evolve with such a
| bacteria. That's creepy to think about. "My tv got eaten
| by plastic termites"... As you say life often finds a
| way.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Until ... life finds a way ..._
|
| In particular, a mutation that drops the need for
| catalyst turns out to be metabolically beneficial.
| [deleted]
| dwnvoted2hell wrote:
| So you breed them in an environment interspersed with other
| things? There seem to be at least 5 organisms that do some
| level of plastic digestion.
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| I doubt this will ever compete with power generation from
| incineration. Most plastics are recycled into power and smoke.
| https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/03/shoul...
| melicerte wrote:
| How is this different from the products currently developed by
| companies like Carbios[1] ?
|
| I'm a totally ignorant in physics and chemistry (except from what
| I've studied at school) so excuse my genuine question.
|
| [1] https://carbios.fr/en/
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Carbios looks like a product. This is essentially a
| microorganism that feeds on plastics.
| melicerte wrote:
| So this is the same as what is talked about in the post?
| addHocker wrote:
| Thats gonna be a hard to swallow pill for a lot of sea
| wildlife.
| scrooched_moose wrote:
| I've always been curious about the balance here.
|
| Breaking down plastic waste sounds great, except it almost
| certainly releases CO2. Leaving it in a landfill is probably the
| better option.
|
| Granted, if they could turn these plastics into some sort of
| biofuel it would be a much different story. Better to convert the
| waste we already have then pump more oil. It's unclear whether
| that is a byproduct of this microbe.
| sytelus wrote:
| It seems there is a ritual of articles every 6 months for finding
| a microbe to degrade plastic for past 5 years now. I wonder what
| is the real story.
| gadders wrote:
| There are also caterpillars that eat plastic:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-00593-y
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