the enzymology to go from terephthalic acid to something more benign is also out there…
https://watermark.silverchair.com/30-1-2-217.pdf
as is the ability to metabolize ethylene glycol: bacterial degredation of ethylene glycol - Google Search
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thinks have progressed since I last looked at the literature.
seems that the microbes are on this already, and making progress worldwide.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.13.422558v1.abstract
thanks @Franklin!
attempts to rapidly figure out if anyone has LOOKED in human microflora stymied by “it’s our trash”.
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Bump, in case someone missed it. 
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bump.
because we’re drowning in it.
they’re drowning in it.
shit ain’t just gonna go away.
unless the fungi get it done.
at which point they may decide its our turn.
just like they got the dinosaurs.
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I did and Im glad u did…
Humic substances are the rainy day bandaid of biology.
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Bump.
If we can fold all the proteins we should be able to build enzymology from scratch in short order.
So what’s with leaving it to the bacteria or fungi to clean up our mess?
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The corporate giants who push plastic should be funding this idea. They fund keep America beautiful. The best way to prevent pollution is to reduce consumption, but corporate America really hates that idea. Give a hoot, don’t pollute…because the blame is on you for littering and not us for making all that plastic.
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so some nerds mod the strain to eat all kinds of plastics and then engineers design some kind of spraying device to spray the islands of trash with the lq and after that the nerds make it rain using cloud seeding and control the weather to make it perfect conditions for them to fruit
While I love the creative and divergent thinking element of this idea - I have a few intuitions that I think could create some pushback. For context - I studied Biotech in my undergrad (Independently and in classes) - and have always been focused toward pursuits of wildlife conservation. So I have a fair amount of knowledge in this domain that may hopefully provide some new perspectives.
1 - Regulatory. Outside of the ironicly ubiquitous Monsanto food crops, releasing genetically modified organisms into nature is at worst a legal issue, and at best being shunned by the academic community. So if a boots on the ground approach was taken with this solution, it would likely be stopped before it started.
2 - Microplastics have a tendency to absorb and retain toxic chemicals from their environment (say, dioxins or PCBs from a landfill) before hitting the ocean. This already causes so called “biomagnification” of those chemicals as they ascend the food chain and increase in potency in higher order predators. My intuition would be that having the ability to full break down the plastics in vivo would serve to increase the bioavailability of those toxins, amplifying their effects within the organism, which could be disastrous. Outside of this, I could not imagine the metabolites of plastic to necessarily be benefitial to the organisms
3 - A problem problem with genetic engineering most people dont think about is what I will for simplicity call “metabolic incentive”. Say an e.coli strain it engineered to produce some desired chemical. Engineered for efficiency the bacteria expends 10% of its metabolic resources producing this chemical, meaning it is 10% less effective at growth of itself than any mutants who deactivate that gene. Over time, you will notice the total number of bacteria producing your gene will diminish and be taken over by mutants who dont express your gene. Life is great at optimizing, so if left unchecked (or not engineered in a way to make your chemical production metabolically advantageous) it will optimize away your work. This is why people commonly make a master stock of freshly engineered bacteria and freeze dry it and use small amounts of the original strain rather than keep using the later colonies. So unfortunately in many regards, making something to take care of our problems on their own sadly may not be viable, or will take some extreme metabolism-craft.
That said - There is somewhere in the order of a metric fuckton of beautiful things this type of work can do in domains similar to this. The most riveting I have seen is modifying fungi and composting plastics with biomass. However this type of work is much easier (physically - Not so much mentally) than people think. All you would need to do is find openly available gene sequences (can be downloaded for free. easier than you might think) or isolate the gene that codes for your enzyme and have it sequenced (cheaper than you might think) and have some DNA printed (WAY cheaper than it sounds). Once you have that there are literally plasmid kits you can buy from fischer to do the ligation. Run some nice hot and cold baths with some salt buffer and BAM - You are now God.
Appreciate the thought provoking prompt @cyclopath - Great post to pop my Future4200 Cherry - Albeit a few years late.
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Add this trick to the consortium of microbes…
Pretty sure the plastic itself is problematic…and that the required metabolic pathways are being evolved with or without our conscious involvement.
We are destroying the web of life at an unprecedented rate, figuring out how to build/rebuild portions seems like a skill we ought should work on to me
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Welcome to the future @BOSSPHINE! You make some great points, and I like your style of thinking.
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…and yeah, what @BigM said.
welcome! like the way you think.
yeah, I was in middle school when folks figured out we had the tools to cut/ligate/transform and decided they ought should ponder on playing god before going there.
I’m also aware how easy it has become… maybe we need gene-gun control to stop the biohackers fixing their livers so they can get high on edibles?
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I would certainly agree - But I think biology is more terrifying than chemicals when something goes wrong, and humans know scarily little about what we are doing at the moment. Imagine a tetraethyllead or Bhopal situation on the ecosystem scale, but it self replicates.
At the very least it may prompt people to create some biological failsafe mechanisms like the ones mentioned in the Asilomar link (great links btw). But in complete honestly - with AI we will likely be cutting the curve on all this here soon. After alphaFold and the COVID vaccine analysis the final frontier of biotech is mapping DNA with the chemical world. Im hoping for an AI that can derive a perfect enzyatic cocktail tailored for this type of microbiome engineering.
Thanks for the love @BigM @cyclopath ! Always down to chime in on interesting topics like these. I have far too few now that I am in the cannabiz full time.
Control? This sounds like some fun! Who needs all the equipment for conversions? Lets just engineer ourselves to produce 11OH directly from CBD. Think of all the money youd save? Now this I can get behind …
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I have thought about this extensively and the only way we as a species could correct the harm industrialization has done would be to regulate and manage the GLOBAL ecosystem that we as a species don’t even remotely understand.
I have thought and thought some more, i have even conducted my own very labour intensive experiments… one that i specifially enjoyed the most was care of forest floors saturated with needles of coniferous trees.
If you have ever been in a forest with tons of conifers you would know the forest floor is like a spongey matt that traps water and this matt can become so thick it prevents the growth of flora which directly impacts the fauna.
What i did was remove all the needles exposing the soil (you wouldn’t even believe how much physical work was required) and composted them separately using worms sourced from the forest itself.
Can you guess what it did? it grew… everything grew, plants I’d never seen came out of the ground
This also reduces the impact of forest fires.
But scaling it up to tackle hectares? Impossible.
The compost was reintroduced to the forest floor after it was broken down into soil… i only sped up the process of releasing the nutrients in the needles.
What i learnt… humans are the only creatures capable of nurturing and caring for the environment around us.
Soooo… pete has decided to go swimming, he’s bought all his buddies with him
Folks seem a little touchy about engineering whales, or even their micro-flora.
Teaching water fleas the same trick might piss off less people…but it’s arguably more difficult…because the plastic degrading pathways are going to be found in bacteria, or even consortiums of bacteria…
easy enough if you’re just augmenting a fermentation consortium, where tasks could be broken up/compartmentalized…potentially much more complex to move and balance a multi-step pathway in a single critter…non-trivial atm.
…but we’ve got a genome to start from: The genome of the marine water flea Diaphanosoma celebensis: Identification of phase I, II, and III detoxification genes and potential applications in marine molecular ecotoxicology - ScienceDirect and check it, some other mother fucker be talking “molecular ecotoxicology”
There are also sooooo many species represented in “zoo-plankton, that giving ONE the ability to degrade plastic is simply wrong, and giving to all seems impossible.
Unless of course most of their digestion is accomplished by micro-flora?!?
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