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A bacterium that can metabolize plastic, which is notoriously difficult to recycle, could be a biodegrading symbiote as well as a pathogen.
by hirundo 3y ago
A bacterium that can metabolize plastic, which is notoriously difficult to recycle, could be a biodegrading symbiote as well as a pathogen.
- thatguy0900 3y agoWould really suck to have flesh eating bacteria thriving on basically everything in the world though.
- roundandround 3y agoSounds like a variant on the 12 monkeys theme.
- owenmarshall 3y agoFunny, my mind immediately went to Vonnegut. > There was a sound like that of the gentle closing of a portal as big as the sky, the great door of heaven being closed softly. It was a grand AH-WHOOM. I opened my eyes - and all the sea was ice-nine.
- pas 3y agofinally, time to build the caves of steel!
- masklinn 3y agoUsually there’s a limited amount of genetic material to leverage. If a bacteria adapts to eating plastic, you’d expect the rest to start degrading as it becomes unnecessary, and can be recycled to better plastic eating.
- BizarroLand 3y agoGoing to be interesting that our great grandkids will have to deal with plastic rusting.
- yes_man 3y agoTheres an astronomical figure of A Streptococcus bacteria on the human skin, and the same bacteria is responsible for most necrotizing fasciitis. But yet the disease is rare. So flesh eating bacteria is already thriving all over the world, it’s just that infecting human tissue isn’t trivial for bacteria
- aeternum 3y agoOrganisms, especially bacteria tend to specialize, so evolution towards optimized plastic eating usually means evolution away from flesh eating. This is how the first vaccine was invented (and why we call them vaccines). >the doctor took pus from the cowpox lesions on a milkmaid’s hands and introduced that fluid into a cut he made in the arm of an 8-year-old boy named James Phipps. Cowpox was sufficiently evolved away from humans and towards cows that it was easy for the human immune system to fight, and provides antibody protection against the much more dangerous smallpox.
- dmbche 3y agoThe issue here is that it is uncontrollable - it spreads easily and sticks to the plastic, from my understanding. This means that the side effects of the plastic eating are very widespread. If these bacterium are dangerous to life in the ocean, and they can be moved around on plastic particulate on top of spreading from fish, the implication for the oceanic ecosystem seems grim to me - if not the whole biosphere.
- witchesindublin 3y agoThe article says that the bacteria uses plastic but does it actually eat it?
- jacobsenscott 3y agoNot from my reading. I think most of the commenters on this are mis-reading the article.
- cthalupa 3y agoThere are some bacteria that we are aware of that eat plastic - Rhodococcus ruber is probably the most prominent - but my understanding is that we are not aware of any vibrio bacteria that does, and that's what they're worried about in the sargassum.
- hirundo 3y agoYou're right, my bad, the article only says the bacteria attaches to the plastic.
- hinkley 3y agoCarrion eaters with the ability to digest plastic would help tremendously. Be they pupae or vultures.