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Interesting stuff, would love to hear more intuition about why this is difficult. Is it just that we haven't found an economical pathway for metabolizing plastics, or is there a fundamental reason why one should not exist?

Hydrocarbons have an energy density 2-3x higher than glucose, so naively it seems like there should be a profitable metabolic pathway!

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Hydrocarbons are extremely stable, which means it requires a large energy input to break them up.

The article doesn't go into a lot of detail, but my guess is that the bacteria can break up the carbamate links.

As a basic analogy, think of it like human metabolism burning fat vs. carbohydrates. Fat is much more energy dense, but until you starve the body of carbohydrates, your body won't burn it. This pathway likely exists as a "backup" metabolic system so that in the absence of easy-to-digest feedstocks, the microbe can still live, but at an energetic cost.

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