Scientists use bacteria to turn plastic waste into paracetamol
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Then it seems the big finding here is that this Lossen rearrangement, a regular non-biological chemical step, doesn't kill E. Coli. They derive PABA from that step.
And the E. Coli hasn't done anything yet, but since it's still alive, the cute trick is to turn PABA into APAP (acetaminophen). We already knew how to do that, but I suppose it demonstrates the point
Now what I don't get is what was wrong with running the Lossen step separately, and only feeding the output to the bacteria.
This article makes it sound like a miracle way to turn plastic into small molecules. They found that one of the step won't kill E. Coli. But it seems like all the steps were already possible before.
Edit:
> Paracetamol is the Australian Approved Name and British Approved Name as well as the international nonproprietary name used by the WHO and in many other countries; acetaminophen is the United States Adopted Name and Japanese Accepted Name and also the name generally used in Canada, Venezuela, Colombia, and Iran. Both paracetamol and acetaminophen are contractions of chemical names for the compound.
Source: Wikipedia
In amounts less than 4 grams every 24 hours.
And not an mRNA vaccine, those are kind of too simple and are mainly there to annoy the immune system. You would either use a virus to inject new genes into bacteria or insert plasmids into bacteria in a lab which would later be consumed.