SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the soylent-[place-color-here]-is-plastic-garbage dept.
Food of the Future? 'Generator' Turns Plastic Trash Into Edible Protein:
Two U.S. scientists have won a 1 million euro ($1.18 million) prize for creating a food generator concept that turns plastics into protein.
The 2021 Future Insight Prize went to Ting Lu, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Stephen Techtmann, associate professor of biological sciences at Michigan Technological University, for their project. It uses microbes to degrade plastic waste and convert it into food.
The German science and technology company Merck sponsors the prize. Global plastics production totaled 368 million metric tons in 2019. The only decline in the past 60 years came because the COVID-19 pandemic choked production of goods worldwide as factories sputtered and shipping slowed down.
[...] The two scientists, who call their project a food “generator,” focused on finding an efficient, economical and versatile technology that finds a use for plastics that are at the end of their useful life and would otherwise end up in landfills or oceans.
The resulting foods “contain all the required nutrition, are nontoxic, provide health benefits and additionally allow for personalization needs,” according to Merck.
The scientists learned to exploit synthetically altered microbes, programming them genetically to convert waste into food.
Gives new meaning to the phrase you are what you eat.
Journal Reference:
Nicholas S. McCarty, Rodrigo Ledesma-Amaro. Synthetic Biology Tools to Engineer Microbial Communities for Biotechnology, Trends in Biotechnology (DOI: 10.1016/j.tibtech.2018.11.002)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by PinkyGigglebrain on Tuesday July 27 2021, @12:16AM (4 children)
Sure, the synthetically altered microbes is probably made so it can only exist in the vats in a factory or lab, but as we all know sooner or later these bacteria will share some genes with a similar bacteria or fungus that can survive outside a factory/lab. I wonder whats going to happen when it does.
I remember another engineered bacteria that was supposed to turn farm waste into Ethanol fuel for the farmers. Great idea, only it turned out that if the bacteria had gotten into the wild there was a very real possibility it could have killed most of the plant life on the surface of the Earth [wordpress.com], sea based vegetation would have been fine, probably..
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 27 2021, @12:58AM (1 child)
I don't think the plastic goes in without preprocessing. Besides, no free lunch, if the microbes got the function to degrade plastic, very likely they paid for their specialization with something that's essential to survival outside a well tuned environ in a reactor.
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Tuesday July 27 2021, @02:13AM
I hope your right. I know of too many situations where something that was supposed to be "impossible" or at minimum "highly improbable" happened in regards to GMOs. usually the results have been benign but the experts said it couldn't happen, and Nature found a way. to take advantage of what Man had wrought.
But, as it is I'm not going to lose any sleep worrying about it.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 27 2021, @01:08AM (1 child)
The horror piece you linked, states: "anything beyond one or two parts of alcohol per million is lethal to all known plant life."
Which is a blatant, stupid, crazy lie.
https://www.ehow.co.uk/info_8006187_effect-alcohol-plants.html [ehow.co.uk]
https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-313X.2001.01146.x [doi.org]
When an article is fucked up THAT deeply with regard to a verifiable fact, anything else it states should also be assumed false unless supported by independent sources.
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Tuesday July 27 2021, @02:04AM
My, my, such a strong response from an AC to an article critical of GMOs.
From the first article you linked,
I guess I have to point out that there is a difference between exposing a full grown plant occasionally with an Ethanol solution as described in the quote above and trying to raise a plant from seed, which is what my linked article was talking about ,in the constant presence of Ethanol are very different things. Even the article you linked to points out that exposing plants to Ethanol will suppress it's growth. Just think what happens when you try to sprout a seed in that environment.
As to the second article you linked it seems to be discussing the effect of Ethanol on a GMO plant specifically engineered to use Ethanol as a trigger for the genes that have been added to the plant. But I'll admit that by the time I got to the part about how they added genes from a fungus to the plant to use it as a trigger for other genetic modifications I was getting over my head. Perhaps you or another person who can actually understand rest of what it's talking about can explain it to the rest of us in splain English and also detail how it actually refutes the statements made by the botanists in the article I original linked that dealt with unmodified plants being exposed to constant Ethanol contamination of their roots.
After reviewing the articles you linked I didn't find anything that refutes or contradicts the article I originally linked.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."