AI-engineered enzyme eats entire plastic containers | Hacker News Reader

AI-engineered enzyme eats entire plastic containers

chemistryworld.com

82 pointsgmays38 comments

I've always sort of thought that, given the amount of plastics that's in our oceans, together with a bunch of hungry microorganisms, odds are eventually one will evolve that eats plastics and it will flourish. Prima facie this may even sound like a good development.

Except now you're faced with a world where plastics rot, not just the plastics we want to go away, but the plastics we want to stay around. We use plastics in a lot of places where this would be a Bad Thing, such as electrical insulators.

From 1933, before the explosion of modern plastics, the poem Metropolitan Nightmare touches on a similar idea, termites that evolve to eat steel:

https://poets.org/poem/metropolitan-nightmare

It's mostly about climate change, though.

There was a Judge Dredd comic where a bacteria that eats "plasteen" is accidentally released and collapses buildings, and also eats a man's artificial heart.

I'm guessing that the writer read that poem.

it's not a given that this will happen on a human timescale. The carboniferous period lasted 60M years before bacteria evolved the ability to break down cellulose.

Plastic-eating bacteria have actually already been identified <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideonella_sakaiensis>

I think the big difference now from then is that we have a lot of bacteria that already are in the ballpark of doing the right thing, they just need some help with the polymer structure. That's perhaps a smaller gap to bridge.

There was a movie about that. What was it? Oh yes, "The Andromeda Strain".

Michael Crichton would have a better legacy if he had not turned to global climate disruption denialism in his final years.

The problem with microorganisms eating all the waste plastic is that then the carbon in it is no longer sequestered.

> Michael Crichton would have a better legacy if he had not turned to global climate disruption denialism in his final years.

Wait. I read his stuff and he carefully didn't deny it, just pointed out that it's super important to have way more data than pop cultural opinions were being echo-chamber based on.

That was his line. But (a) he was wrong, and (b) had the oncoming catastrophe been smaller than predicted, stalling action would still have been wrong.

The massive build-out of wind and solar power generation has made energy radically cheaper than it has ever been. Had we started sooner, we would not only have a much smaller crisis now, but we would have spent overwhelmingly less on coal and oil, and polluted correspondingly less. Even without the looming crisis, we would be much better off, and Saudi Arabia and Russia would not now command nearly so much influence in the world.

Exactly to the degree that Crichton personally stalled action, blood is on his hands.

"The massive build-out of wind and solar power generation has made energy radically cheaper than it has ever been."

As far as i know nuclear power and to some extent hydro power made the energy cheaper. Solar is expensive and it is not clear what its benefits are. Wind ...

Solar is by far the cheapest source of energy ever fielded, followed closely by wind. Nukes are among the most expensive still in common use.

If you are hearing that nuke power is cheap, you are being lied to. Just now, nukes are about even with solar and wind backed with natural gas if, but only if, you ignore their capital cost. But solar and wind costs are still falling.

Once renewables have been built out enough to be able to displace other energy sources, they will need to be supplemented with storage. (Before, there is no point: charging storage from fossil fuels would be counterproductive.) Storage cost is on the same exponential free-fall we saw for solar and wind, so that when time comes to start building out storage, renewables + storage will be cheaper than solar alone, today.

He didn't outright deny it, but he was not acting in good faith when rallying against the mainstream perspective. I remember seeing an example where he specifically made an argument using a projection model that wasn't accurate, conveniently ignoring the fact that that model was only 1 of 3 and another one of the 3 was almost spot on.

Depolymerization was only an incidental side effect in The Andromeda Strain. I'd say Pedler & Davis's near-contemporary publication Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters would be the seminal work in the field.

It’s a great read! Well researched. Read it just last week after a recommendation here on HN.

That book has held up surprisingly well.

It's out on Kindle.

But, without a movie.

Anyone who watched the Andromeda Strain movie but didn't read the book (preferably at an impressionable age) really missed out on some awesome sauce.

Of course I read it, back when. But people don't read books anymore, do they?

Favorite recent book lately is by Don Eyles, "Sunburst and Luminary", about developing the Apollo lunar landing software. I bought it off the website below, which delivered quickly without fuss.

http://sunburstandluminary.com/

I take the opportunity to remember Hal Laning (d. 2012), the person who programmed the executive task management "OS" on the Apollo Guidance Computer, that saved Apollo 11. He gets too little recognition. He created, too, credibly the first compiler ever.

Eyles is sitting on my desk, up next in the queue. Good to hear it's worthwhile.

“ The problem with microorganisms eating all the waste plastic is that then the carbon in it is no longer sequestered.”

This ignores secondary effects like the fact that less plastics might allow more life which does sequester carbon.

How? Plastic trash takes a miniscule area on the world map - even if a rainforest would pop up on every trash place, it would not offset the emissions from the bacteria that eat it.

Also, the optimistic scenario would be that such bacteria would release co2. If instead they released methane, we would be doomed.

Microplastics (in cosmetics for example) seemto harm ocean life, the more ocean life the better :)

> such as electrical insulators.

I'd worry much more about the medical sector.

Even if the medical sector would use plastics nowhere, a sudden vanishing of electrical insulators would be catastrophic.

In 2009, a Taiwanese high-school student (Tseng I-ching) discovered bacteria that decomposes polystyrene [0]. I think she deserves credit for starting this field of research.

[0] https://taiwantoday.tw/news.php?unit=10,23,45,10&post=15307

Why not just bury the stuff? That's a ton of carbon that isn't going into the atmosphere. They are kind of going the wrong way. If you depolymerize the junk it's going to degrade to CO2 eventually.

In fact, plastics are an excellent carbon sink if we ever need a durable method of sequestering carbon. Plastics wouldn't be nearly as terrible if we weren't making them from oil. Sequestering atmospheric CO2 and polymerizing it using enzymes would mean that we are taking it out of the atmosphere and putting it back in the ground where it belongs.

What are the long term effects of the enzyme itself as the environmental toxin? Plastics are not a problem at all since they decompose naturally if you give them enough time. There will barely be any plastic left 500 years after we stop producing new plastic.

The title of this link sounds like the premise to a dystopian future novel.

It’s already written: Mutant 59. Good read.

Brainstorming. With all the talk about micro plastics, what happens if this type of enzyme is digested?

Does the type of process in the reaction and it’s byproducts do damage to us? Is AI actually out to get us lol

Works at 50°C - now I was about to write the AI made a mistake and wanted it to work at 50°F instead, but then this is also no healthy body temperature :)

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/05/record-breaking-heatw...

Part of the world has already started hitting 50°C because of global warming. I guess world getting warmer would means higher chances of such bacteria evolving naturally. India and Pakistan have high population cities with huge waste dumps/land fills so this enzyme or similar evolving naturally is a possibility.

Hmm, having paid quite a lot to replace my lead water pipe with HDPE I hope it doesn't eat that too. the durability of plastic is a benefit under many circumstances.

I thought mice have a taste for HDPE water pipes. Or is that just the PEX system tubing?

A plumber once told me that it's because they can sense that water is inside, that it's soft enough to chew through, and they are after the water.

Would be cool if this eats the micro-plastics inside our bodies since we've been consuming them for the past ~50 years.

But not so cool if it (e.g.) started eating your artificial heart valve or something.

Depends on what the output is

fast forward to - AI-engineered enzyme insertion allows biological agents to defeat PPE

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