Science news stories pop up from time to time telling us that microbes have been discovered that digest plastic or extract rare metals. Yet somehow, we never hear about these again. Are they all fool's gold, false alarms, mountains out of molehills?
No, we don't get to follow up on them because of where they fall in the regulatory chain. Works in Progress: The 1970s Law Holding Back Biotechnology.
Engineers at the University of Texas at Austin therefore took these PET-eating enzymes and used computational tools to make an improved variant, called FAST-PETase. This enzyme is 98 percent identical to the natural version but digests PET plastics in less than 24 hours. The next step could be to place FAST-PETase back into living cells and release them onto landfills. But even putting the gene back into its original host, I. sakaiensis, triggers TSCA, ensuring that the reconstituted organism can’t be used.
If you know more about this than I do, feel free. Sometimes Works in Progress leaves out important points.
5 comments:
I read a story about few years called Ill Wind, about an organism that was released to clean up an oil spill in San Francisco Bay. The organism became airborne and started eating anything and everything that had a petroleum base. Cars ran out of gas, planes crashed, the electrical grid went down and plastics turned into an oozy mess.
It seemed kind of far fetched to me at the time so I lost interest and didn't finish the book.
See Michael Crichton, Andromeda Strain. I understand the concern, but it may be overblown.
Young people have no idea how pervasive (and essential) petrochemicals are these days. The one thing that seems to hit home is when I tell them that their contract lenses are ultimately derived from petrochemicals, and without them, they would have to go back to old fashioned glass glasses.
After the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf, bacteria appeared that would happily eat the oil. Bacteria like hydrocarbons, and don't seem to care much whether it's sugar, oil, or plastic. They evolve naturally to eat whatever's around and to use whatever energy source is handy; they've been doing it for 4 billion years.
With metal frames and sometimes very thick glass lenses.
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