smallworlnd on Nostr: That's a great question! I think the short answer is 'not yet'. The long answer is ...
That's a great question! I think the short answer is 'not yet'.
The long answer is that we can't throw microbes into a chamber with stuff we want to recycle and have it be transformed in some new useful way, even if we provide conditions for more effective adaptation. It'll get degraded and transformed in ways that will be useful to the microbes primarily, if at all. That said, we have a fairly good idea of the arsenals that microbes employ to achieve their ends, at least the enzymes they use to catalyze the first step or two. Protein/enzyme engineering is a hot field these days and scientists have been able to adapt naturally expressed microbial genes to to make some big breakthroughs on complex problems.
Recycling is far more useful to us than degradation because most of the work is done. Ideally we would modify waste plastics into something useful for a different application. The fact that there are so many different kinds of plastics that may or may not maintain structural integrity is a fairly big problem, though. I think it'll be exciting to see what comes out of bioengineering existing genetic material to achieve useful transformations at scale. AI will also play a big role propelling that kind of biotech.
The long answer is that we can't throw microbes into a chamber with stuff we want to recycle and have it be transformed in some new useful way, even if we provide conditions for more effective adaptation. It'll get degraded and transformed in ways that will be useful to the microbes primarily, if at all. That said, we have a fairly good idea of the arsenals that microbes employ to achieve their ends, at least the enzymes they use to catalyze the first step or two. Protein/enzyme engineering is a hot field these days and scientists have been able to adapt naturally expressed microbial genes to to make some big breakthroughs on complex problems.
Recycling is far more useful to us than degradation because most of the work is done. Ideally we would modify waste plastics into something useful for a different application. The fact that there are so many different kinds of plastics that may or may not maintain structural integrity is a fairly big problem, though. I think it'll be exciting to see what comes out of bioengineering existing genetic material to achieve useful transformations at scale. AI will also play a big role propelling that kind of biotech.