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Dubbed “superworms” perhaps because of their size, the plump, shiny larvae of the black beetle are often content to eat wheat bran. But some two-inch-tall creatures have recently found themselves dining at the service of science with even more bizarre food: polystyrene, the long-lasting plastic packaging material sometimes known by the brand name Styrofoam.
Moreover, the larvae that managed to suffocate this peculiar raw material, as you might guess, did not go extinct. As scientists document An article published Thursday in the journal Microbial GenomicsThey even gained some weight and were often able to turn into insects, prompting researchers to check their digestive systems for microbes that could break down polystyrene. If scientists can understand the toolkits of such microbes, they may be able to find a better way to recycle this stubborn substance that, if left on its own, can persist in the environment for hundreds of years or more.
These aren’t the first beetles to feed on polystyrene in the lab. Mealworms are known their ability to eat the substance that makes up the packing peanutsAmong other plastics, said Christian Rinke, a microbiologist at the University of Queensland in Australia and author of the new paper. Both mealworms and superworms observed to consume polystyreneand when they are fed with antibiotics, they lose this ability. So the researchers concluded that the gut microbiome is behind this unusual ability.
The question was, what exactly was in these microbiomes? To find out, Dr. Rinke and colleagues grew three groups of superworms in the lab. One group ate bran, one ate polystyrene blocks, and a third ate nothing. (Experiments were temporarily halted due to the propensity of hungry superworms to be cannibals; giving each unfed superworm its own private space allowed the study to continue.)
While dandruff is much more attractive to superworms, they were willing to try polystyrene. Within 48 hours the stool of the polystyrene group turned from light brown to white and their weight increased very slowly over three weeks.
When it was time for the insects to turn into insects, the dandruff eaters completed the transition about 93 percent of the time; Those who died of starvation only collected 10 percent. Strikingly, 66.7 percent of the polystyrene-eating larvae that were given a chance to pupate were successful. They managed to get enough energy to transform it from the notorious indigestible matter.
Dr. “Polystyrene is definitely a poor diet,” Rinke said. But “the worms can survive – they don’t seem sick or anything.”
The researchers sequenced all the DNA they could extract from the larvae’s guts. As the microbes worked to break down the polystyrene, they were less concerned with what specific microbes were present than with which enzymes were produced. They identified a handful of possible candidates—all types of enzymes known for their slicing and chopping abilities—possibly breaking the polystyrene into smaller pieces.
Dr. “The next step will be to express these enzymes in the lab and experimentally confirm that they do what we think they do,” Rinke said. Said.
With more detail on the conditions required by these enzymes and the precise nature of their abilities, Dr. Rinke hopes that an industrial process to recycle packaging foam may one day be devised. Currently, used polystyrene can be turned into certain building materials to keep them out of landfills. However, a much better solution would be a way to break down its components and then rebuild them into something new, perhaps using microbes that could turn them into fresh bioplastics.
“It will make everything more interesting economically,” he said. “What is sought will create something.”
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