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Comment by gilleain | Hacker News Reader

Nice. A few points:

* This protein acts as a PETase - see also <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37659327> - but may work at room temperature, and more efficiently

* The term 'artificial protein' is a bit awkward - it's a modified version of an existing protein from an anemone (see : <https://www.rcsb.org/structure/4tsy>)

* The scaffold protein is a pore-forming structure - where multiple trans-membrane helices come together, like melittin in bee venom - so they claim it could work as part of a membrane-bound complex

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> The term 'artificial protein' is a bit awkward

I agree. The proper term would be engineered protein, since it is a fusion of two existing protein domains: an already engineered cutinase (a PETase ancestor) with a pore-forming protein (FraC).

What happens if eventually we find this protein in the wild? :)

The entire plastics industry is screwed.

It is only a matter of time before bacteria evolve some way of getting at the energy stored in plastics. Once that happens, once plastics start to "rot" as they are eaten by bacteria, the impacts on our technology could be catastrophic. The world might looks very steampunk as metal and ceramics replace plastics.

Wood-eating bacteria already exist and we use wood as a material for many things. It's not like such bacteria just spread from breath, like covid-viruses...

Look up shipworm, which historically took out many ships. Plenty of stuff eats wood quickly enough to cause issues. We have just evolved countermeasures. And trees are the product of a billion years of anti-predator evolution. Plastic is different than wood. It is homogenous and dead. Something like a plastic-eating bacteria might move through it exponentially.

There are plenty of old wooden houses still standing (even ones which predate modern plastic based paints), people still make boats out of wood too. I suspect similar things will happen with plastic, we'll learn to build and protect plastic in the way that we used to do with wood, and probably more stuff will be built out of stone.

That variant would be a natural/wild-type one.

We already make many things from materials that can be degraded by microbes (wood, cotton, leather, etc.). They can be preserved by keeping them dry, or with paint or other surface treatments. For the rare circumstances where this is impossible (e.g. medical devices) we have fluoropolymers, which I'm confident aren't going to get degraded by microbes any time soon.

A long time ago, wood (Lignin) wasn’t biodegradable. Trees just piled up instead of rotting. That resulted in oil deposits. These we turn into plastics.

Bacteria acquiring genes to feed on plastics would lead to closing the circle again. Although supply will be cut short when humanity gives up producing plastics.

> Trees just piled up instead of rotting. That resulted in oil deposits.

That resulted in coal deposits of the Carboniferous. Not oil.

"microplastics in bottles" is even more awkward - I mean, as long as they're part of a bottle, they're by definition not microplastics?

Maybe they're very very small bottles.

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