At Last Plastic Eating Worms Came Into Existence - Plastic Problem's Will Be Solved

Plastics are always an unsolved problem to our environment. But at last the problem is solved by the discovery of plastic eating worms.

 The wax worm’s potential was discovered by accident when biologist Federica Bertocchini cleaned out her hives and temporarily placed the parasites in a plastic shopping bag. Bertocchini is a part-time beekeeper, and is used to removing wax worms from her hives, where the caterpillars like to munch on the beeswax inside. After leaving a recently evicted troupe of wax worms in a plastic bag one day, Bertocchini found that the worms simply ate their way out.

Bertocchini was curious as to whether the centimeter-long wax worms were actively digesting the bag’s plastic, or just chewing through it. She confirmed that they were, by mashing the creatures into a paste and applying it to a plastic film, which slowly degraded.

Bertocchini, a researcher at the Spanish National Research Council, and scientists at Cambridge University, to investigate the feeding habits of the centimeter-long Galleria mellonella grubs. In lab tests, they discovered that 100 worms can devour 92 milligrams of polyethylene in as little as 12 hours.

With further research, the scientists hope to identify the enzymes that the wax worms produce when they go to work on a bag. The genes for these might then be put into bacteria, such as E coli, or into marine organisms called phytoplankton, and used to degrade plastics in the wild.

Published in the journal Current Biology, the study says it is likely that digesting the beeswax found in hives involves breaking down similar types of chemical bonds.

Paolo Bombelli, a biochemist at Cambridge who took part in the study, said the finding could lead to a solution to the plastic waste mounting up in waterways, oceans and landfills.

Angels Glow- Bacteria That Saved Civil Soliders

After 1862’s American Civil War Battle of Shiloh left 16,000 soldier’s dead and 3,000 soldier’s wounded.The medics was able to reach the wounded soldiers in Shiloh after two days. These wounded soldiers waited on the rainy, muddy Tennessee battlefield for two days. Some of the soldiers noticed that their wounds glowed in the darkness. Because the glowing wounds healed more quickly and cleanly, the mysterious force was termed "Angel's Glow."

In 2001, this "Angel's Glow" mystery was finally solved. Seventeen year old, Bill Martin was visiting Shiloh with his family, where he heard about the strange glow. His mother, microbiologist at the USDA Agricultural Research Service, had studied luminescent bacteria, and Martin wondered if similar bacteria might have been at work.

 With his friend Jon Curtis, Martin researched Photorhabdus luminescens(which is bioluminescent, meaning it gives off its own light), a type of bacteria gave off a light that was pale blue in color that lives in the guts of parasitic nematodes. When nematodes vomit up the glowing bacteria, Photorhabdus luminescens kills the other microbes living in the nematoad's host.

Normally,  Photorhabdus luminescens couldn't live in the human body since it dies at human body temperature. But Martin and Curtis, studying the historical records and the conditions in Shiloh, realized that the nighttime temperatures were low enough for the soldiers to develop hypothermia, allowing the bacteria to thrive in their bodies, kill off competing bacteria, and perhaps save the lives of their human hosts.

For solving this decades old mystery, Curtis and Martin won first place in the 2001 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.