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Will bacteria evolve the ability to break down plastics?

Best Answers

Cellulose-based plastics are broken down because bacterial cellulase is capable of disassembling the polymers that make up the plastic. I suspect most plastics are too inert to be reactive to proteins, so no amount of evolution will ever produce a system that can break them down. read more

The bacteria cling to the plastic, then break the plastic down into terephthalic acid and ethylene glycol in a two-step process. They then digest those two substances. PET was only invented about 70 years ago. That means the bacteria must have evolved the ability to consume the plastic over the intervening decades. The results are published in Science. read more

Bacteria and fungi co-evolved with natural materials, all the while coming up with new biochemical methods to harness the resources from dead matter. But plastics have only been around for about 70 years. read more

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