Engineered yeast for converting plastic and biomass compounds to food additives
acs.digitellinc.com82 points by ehwa37 11 hours ago
82 points by ehwa37 11 hours ago
> The researchers took PET plastic, discarded corn plant stalks and leaves, and other biomass and put it through a proprietary process called oxidative hydrothermal dissolution. Created by SIU Carbondale Geology Professor Ken Anderson, this method uses water and oxygen at high temperatures and pressures to break down tough material into microbe-accessible pieces. Then, those pieces are fed to the programmed yeasts, which transform them into a variety of new food ingredients, including proteins, fats and acids. Finally, the researchers add fiber, starch and sweetener to the mix and extrude it through a 3D printer, forming protein-rich cookies dubbed µBites (pronounced "microbites"). [https://phys.org/news/2026-08-yeasts-pet-plastic-crop-protei...]
It kind of sounds like they made food out of corn plant stalks and leaves and "other biomass", added fiber, starch, and sweetener, but then just polluted the product with processed waste plastic as an additive. If this really is just using trash as a filler in actual food that's pretty dystopian. I'm sure companies would happily line up to sell their industrial waste products to food companies as an additive, but I'm not seeing the appeal in this for consumers.
Vegetables grown in shit, garbage, and pesticides are fine as long as the levels of harmful residues are low enough by the time they reach people's mouths. Not appealing, but also not that "dystopian"
Is there any of this ”bacteria converting plastic to fuel/food/neutral stuff“ actually applied anywhere at scale under economically reasonably conditions?
Isn’t this the plot of The Andromeda Strain?
It will be interesting to see how much carbon dioxide is also created through this process.
If you don't eat your biomass compound goo, you can't have any PlastiYum bacterial sludge
Maybe the only thing more worrisome than microplastics everywhere is unstoppable plastics eating organisms everywhere, eating through all plastics everywhere.
Usually these bioengineered yeasts need pretty specific growth conditions in order to eat in this case ethylene glycol, not raw finished plastic. In this case they say "plastic-derived substrates" which means they're pre-processing the waste plastic.
Good thing microorganisms are famous for their slow rate of change in dynamic environments…
I'm not sure what this adds. The yeast here is chomping ethylene glycol for carbon, and tons of soil bacteria can already do that. And I should add that highly specialized industrial/lab yeasts have existed for a long time and aren't prevalent in the environment, they just don't like to grow outside of narrow(ish) conditions. Highly prevalent wild yeasts tend to eat a variety of sugars, not glycol.
>Usually these bioengineered yeasts need pretty specific growth conditions in order to eat
Until, say, they mutate independently. Now, I have no idea how likely that is, but I think the fear is not baseless. There's a fun SF book, "Directive 51", which explores this a bit. Not a bad book to cuddle up with.
Yeast drift a little but aren’t picking up new metabolic pathways very readily. Moreover these yeast don’t eat plastic they eat a component of PET in a bioreactor.
> bioengineered yeasts need pretty specific growth conditions
In a natural environment this will not hold. Organisms are unstable; they change all the time, simpler ones even more so. Mutants with a faster growth rate will, up to a certain maximum, take over from slower growing or growth-deficient mutants. There isn't really a compelling growth advantage for plastic-degrading organisms, which is one reason why plastic stays so long in the environment.
All pre-processing steps further add to the cost, so we will year after year hear about it - and then wonder why nothing happens and plastics keep compounding in the ocean. And this is not new either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_v._Chakrabarty
>In a natural environment this will not hold. Organisms are unstable; they change all the time, simpler ones even more so.
Jurassic narratives notwithstanding, unsure if this is a real problem. If you have a yeast that will only survive under narrow unnatural circumstances, I would expect freeing it into the wild with natural circumstances means it dies - not uses nature to find a way to destroy the world as a form of poetic justice for ever having been created.
People who have never worked with anything biology related love to spout off about Jurassic Park. As a brewer I can assure you all that fancy special purpose yeasts just don’t turn into other stuff readily and often lose their modifications when they interact with wild yeasts.
Are you perhaps misreading what I wrote, or am I misreading what you wrote? My reading of what you wrote makes me think you are interpreting me as claiming special purpose yeasts turn into other stuff readily, etc. etc.
on edit: my confusion stems from being the first to reference anything Jurassic in the conversation, so you sound somewhat accusatory.
Perhaps soon you'll be needing to apply stains or sealants to your outdoor plastic items. Maybe even purchase treated plastic products that we worry leach toxic chemicals into their surroundings.
You already do if they sit in the sun. The UV light breaks down plastic pretty quickly.
Timescale is the important bit. If organisms degrade plastics in a few hundred years then what plastics are uniquely valuable for will be quite fine indeed.
Why is that worrisome? Might give the fish a chance whose bellies are filling up with plastic rubbish
There’s a fantastically silly but fun book about this the name of which eludes me.
Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters, a 1971 British sci-fi environmental disaster novel written by medical scientist Kit Pedler and television screenwriter Gerry Davis.
No wikipedia page, but goodreads has it here:
That wasn’t it; I just found it, it’s called Ill Wind by Kevin J Anderson
Not plastic, but 'Cats Cradle' by Kurt Vonnegut has something kind of like that.
there was a time in history before fungus came along and ate trees so there were just a huge amount of trees around that couldn't decay. (which is why we have coal actually) this could be something akin to that.
I've heard that the prevailing theory now is that it wasn't the lack of fungus that made coal. Instead, the earth was covered in tropical wetlands, and trees couldn't decay in the anoxic water.
Soylent Green?
There was a Doomwatch episode on his subject with airliners falling out of the sky bcause all the plastic had been eaten away.
And that episode was stretched out into a novel which I linked to above - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/99852816-mutant-59
Someone needs to figure out how to convert mineral oil into food.
If it could be done, we solve world hunger overnight.
Oddly many countries explicitly have a law that such a thing is forbidden. I wonder it it was preemptively protecting farmers?
The Soviet Union ran such a program:
https://www.nytimes.com/1973/11/10/archives/soviet-plant-to-...
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP91T01115R0001000...
The term to search for is "single cell protein."
There are newer approaches to making single cell protein from carbon dioxide and renewable energy instead of fossil oil, like Solein:
There are a few problems with turning oil into single cell protein:
- Microorganisms have small cells that reproduce quickly, which means a lot of nucleic acids in the dry mass, which is trouble for animals (including humans) that can't tolerate a very high purine level in the diet.
- The abundant cell walls of microorganisms also can cause illness when they're a high proportion of dietary intake.
- Feeding single cell protein directly to people has to overcome traditions of cuisine, even in cases where it doesn't actually make people sick. Indirect usage of SCP (e.g. feeding it to salmon, and then having people eat salmon) can overcome that hurdle, but then the cost per human-edible calorie goes up too.
In WW2 Germany invented a way to convert coal into an edible, butter-like substance. I think it was very inefficient though (70 to 1 input/output ratio).
I couldn’t find anything about this in a cursory google search, do you have any more information or links on this?
is there a lot of mineral oil out there? what motivates the suggestion of this particular precursor?
This is a bit nonsensical. How is doing chemistry to mineral oil to turn it into some other hydrocarbon sludge with mediocre nutrition more effective than the stupid hydrocarbon sludge we already have: Corn syrup?
Again, the ONLY reason there is still anyone, anywhere, who suffers from not enough food, is because people in the richest country on earth aren't even willing to spend a few million sending support to extremely needy countries.
Instead, we take a huge fraction of our entire corn crop, turn it into ethanol, and burn it. The primary reason we do it is to waste corn, so that corn prices are higher. We purposely make food more expensive, as a kickback to some real assholes.
World hunger could have been solved a century ago. No technology is required. Zero. At least until we have to figure out a reasonable way to make fertilizers more sustainable.
You know petroleum is actually expensive for a commodity, right? For the price of one barrel of oil, you could get an entire ton of iron ore, 0.8 tons of coal, 20 bushels of corn (about 1000-1200 pounds), 500 pounds of milk, 500 pounds of refined sugar, etc. Petroleum is an input to agriculture, but it enables staggering yield outputs per gallon of input. No amount of chemistry can ever compete with that for simple thermodynamics reasons.
Mechanized agriculture is so efficient that if you leave it to it's own devices it simply bankrupts itself every other year from oversupply. Damn near every functioning country artificially increases the price of basic agricultural commodities to ensure farms are stable. It's a massive handout to a cohort of people that nowadays are basically just very wealthy capital owners, but it also was the actual solution to famine, at least inside those countries.
The rich countries already send enough food to the poorer countries. The problem is their despotic and corrupt governments don't distribute it to the people who need it.
So called “rich countries” don’t even have food self-sufficiency. The only countries near that goal today are China, Vietnam, Brazil a close second.
The USA is food self sufficient if your definition is having enough calories to survive.
In 2011 researchers identified a fungus named pestalotiopsis microspora. It gained widespread attention because it can digest polyurethane plastic and survive entirely in anaerobic conditions, making it a prime candidate for deployment at the bottom of landfills.
I for one look forward to serving this underground deity.
This keeps on re-emerging every year.
The primary issue that has consistently been a problem, is the cost.
soilent goo, again!
you, yes you, area "biomass compound", well maybe not quite yet, but soon, as these things go, but most definitly every last putrid smelly horrible thing is a "biomass compound", and when you add in plastic we are talking about most of the stuff found in millions of dumpsters, and most of the stuff actualy in dumps, or sewers.
This then solves the whole issue of what is allowed to go in which can or bin, which is anything you cant get money for or find someone who will hall it away for free.
I am very very sure that volunteers will soon show up wishing to "return to the great nutrient cycle"
but there is nothing to worry about as I am positive that everything will be tested and cynicly proven to be safe for human consumption
Honestly at this point I think the way to go may be to stop using plastics where they're not absolutely required, and to subsequently burn what goes into landfill while producing electricity and reclaiming heat. Better that than this.
Burn it? With all the talk of carbon capture? Recall that plastic literally consists of a mass of hydrocarbons. Why not bury it?
I think the legitimate answer was groundwater contamination, but that should be solved for other things we bury. I'm on board for non-biodegradable plastic trash sequestration
I'd argue that if we are burning plastics we get to dodge microplastics, and we get a second use of hydrocarbons. Burn enough plastic, maybe we can displace some gas. Optimistic, I realise.
One problem is that plastic generally contains all manner of additives which create a health hazard when burned. Incinerators supposedly filter out the dangerous pollutants, but it seems likely that quite a lot gets into the air. For some of these chemicals we know that tiny concentrations, much smaller than previously thought, are enough to be dangerous. The safest approach IMO is ground sequestration. And of course much better regulation of plastic additives.
How do you define 'not absolutely required'?
Easy cases might be single use plastics outside of a medical environment and anything where there isn't a substitute with adequate properties (I'd ignore economics here and let the market solve)
Ultimately a tricky thing to define though, no argument.
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