Students compete to create bacteria that eats plastic trash from landfills

Students compete to create bacteria that eats plastic trash from landfills

www.examiner.com
College students in Sacramento at the University of California, Davis are working and competing to solve one of the biggest problems of this century, creating b

http://www.examiner.com/article/students-work-to-create-bacteria-that-eats-plastic-trash-from-landfills

synthetic biology

WHAT EATS PLASTIC? |

16 YEAR OLD ASKS and ANSWERS http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/blogs/boy-discovers-microbe-that-eats-plastic Boy discovers microbe that eats plastic / Jun 12 2009 It's not your ...

http://spectrevision.net/2009/09/17/what-eats-plastic/

previously: "Daniel Burd, a Canadian high school student, presented his research on microorganisms that can rapidly biodegrade plastic. Daniel had a thought it seems even the most esteemed PhDs hadn’t considered. Plastic, one of the most indestructible of manufactured materials, does in fact eventually decompose. It takes 1,000 years but decompose it does, which means there must be microorganisms out there to do the decomposing. Could those microorganisms be bred to do the job faster? That was Daniel’s question, and he put to the test with a very simple and clever process of immersing ground plastic in a yeast solution that encourages microbial growth, and then isolating the most productive organisms. The preliminary results were encouraging, so he kept at it, selecting out the most effective strains and interbreeding them. After several weeks of tweaking and optimizing temperatures Burd was achieved a 43 percent degradation of plastic in six weeks, an almost inconceivable accomplishment."