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.

▲

cortesoft 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Good thing microorganisms are famous for their slow rate of change in dynamic environments…

▲

ch4s3 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

▲

tantalor 41 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Of course, the lysine contingency.