20 September, 2020
A team of scientists from Saudi Arabia wrote a paper for the biology preprint server bioRxiv recently with the intriguing title, “Rapid Evolution of Plastic-degrading Enzymes Prevalent in the Global Ocean.” They were surprised that plastic input (production by humans, some 150 teragrams of plastic waste) is not matching plastic output (measurements at sea). What could account for the mismatch? The team discovered that microbes are learning to eat plastic!