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
Welcome to the future @BOSSPHINE! You make some great points, and I like your style of thinking.
…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?
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 …
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?!?