You may think that the only way to stop the pollution of our planet is for everyone to become aware and change our ways. What if we create bacteria that will reduce our impact on the planet through breaking down some of the unwanted pollutants or use it as a sort of catalyst to aid us in creating greener technologies?
One example would be to develop a PET plastic bottle eating bacteria. Despite the fact that PET plastic bottles are so common, it is still doesn’t have cost effective industrial processing. There are bacteria found which lives off the bottles and make it into a more valuable polymer, PHA. Each bacterium eats so much of the PET bottle that they are 24% PHA plastic by volume. These bacteria can be used for further selection in the lab for an even more efficient bottle eating bugs.
Modified bacteria can also be used as a catalyst, the example here is the hydrogen economy. Fuel cell requires expensive platinum catalysts and this can be replaced by bacterium enzyme. The price of enzyme-catalysed cell is more likely to drop than that of the platinum which grows in demand as resources reduce.
These are only two examples; there are much more application where the bacteria can be engineered to do what we want.
Original Article:
How our green technology may rest on bacteria skills
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16841-how-our-green-technology-may-rest-on-bacterial-skills.html
