Mutation, dominance, recessiveness, transformation, transduction are all very common term for biological aspirant. Microbes feed on products we can?t even imagine of. While reading about them and their lifecycle, a question popped up in my mind? Could there be any possibilities of having Plastic consuming microbes? What if it was real and we could make a breakthrough to seemingly not-so-feasible problems that are occurring since invention of plastic??

Could this be in your backyard farm or in your bins? May be they are swimming in local ponds and rivers. Or they could be latent in our foods. Anything is possible and the queries must be answered. As Nature is indeed evolving to ways of dealing with problems even those created by our ?intelligence?.

I was quite hopeful there might me some, as we often read how microorganism mutates, develop resistance and tolerance and likewise.

I googled. Damn!!! I was not innovative in my thoughts. There were plethora of websites full of description about the same.

I would like to happily share few paragraphs that I found worth sharing.

1.       First that caught my eye was nylon eating bacteria which are actually strain of Flavobacterium that can consume by-products of nylon-6 manufacture.  A team of Japanese Scientis led to this amazing discovery nylon eating bacteria. Further study revealed that the three enzymes the bacteria were using to digest the byproducts were significantly different from any other enzymes produced by other Flavobacterium strains (or, for that matter, any other bacteria), and not effective on any material other than the manmade nylon byproducts.

2.       A 1995 paper showed that scientists have also been able to induce another species of bacterium, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, to evolve the capability to break down the same nylon byproducts in a laboratory by forcing them to live in an environment with no other source of nutrients. The P. aeruginosa strain did not seem to use the same enzymes that had been utilized by the original Flavobacterium strain. As described in a 1983 publication, other scientists were able to get the ability to generate the enzymes to transfer from the Flavobacterium strain to a strain of E. coli bacteria via a plasmid transfer.

3.       Genetic analysis shows that the bacteria on the plastic differ from those in the surrounding seawater or on nearby seaweed, says microbiologist Linda Amaral-Zettler of the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole. So far, the DNA sequences obtained by her lab show that almost 25% of the bacteria on one polyethylene surface were vibrios, bacteria from the same group as the cholera bacterium.

4.       The ocean contains vast amounts of plastic, mostly as tiny shards floating just beneath the surface. Under an electron microscope, each scrap of "plastic confetti" becomes "an oasis, a reef of biological activity," says marine microbiologist Tracy Mincer of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. Mincer and his colleagues examined bits of fishing line, a plastic bag and a plastic hurdle (a pre-production plastic pellet) fished out of the Sargasso Sea, an area of the North Atlantic where currents cause debris to accumulate. The region as a whole contains more than 1,100 tons of plastic1. Scanning electron microscopy revealed bacteria-like cells living in pits in the plastic, as if they were eating the surface away. "They look like you took a hot barbecue briquette and threw it into snow," says Mincer. "You see this melting bit all around the outside of the cells, and they're just burrowing into the plastic."

What?s more head scratching is that it?s not confirm whether bio products from consumption of these plastic yield good products or even more toxic and harmful one. Hence leading to uncertainties of positive pathway or negative. More extensive research needs to be done in this case.

Bonus:

While searching for solving plastic problem, I found how two winners in British Columbia of the 2012 Sanofi BioGENEius Challenge Canada and high school students Miranda Wang and Jeanny Yao on their median voyage of solving phthalate problem by finding local bacteria in their river that metabolize them. I was attracted this idea as we also need to ponder on how to solve this problem of mounting bacteria.

Watch the TED vide here << TED VIDEO LINK>>. How confidently they speak about their experiments and enormous enthusiasm in their face. If you are TED followers like me, you must search some other inspiring environmental videos as well.