Even if not in quite the hand-to-mouth-to-stomach way we normally understand it, the bacteria were eating the plastic.
In the years after their discovery, Oda and his student Kazumi Hiraga, now a professor, continued corresponding and conducting experiments.
But the real hope is that this goes beyond a single species of bacteria that can eat a single kind of plastic.
To have any hope of mitigating this globe-spanning environmental disaster of our own making, the bacteria will have to work faster and better.
Left at room temperature, they broke down the tiny bit of plastic into its precursor liquids in about seven weeks.
In the wild, a mutation in an enzyme might occur only once in every few thousand times the bacteria divide.
His hope is that bacteria capable of degrading the mangrove roots will be able to make the jump to plastic. »
