NUS scientists unveil a faster way to "train" bacteria for complex tasks, like munching plastics

Millions of tonnes of plastic waste accumulate in landfills and oceans every year. One promising response is to engineer microbes to break the plastic down into useful chemical building blocks. However, teaching a bacterium to digest plastic efficiently demands fine-tuning not just one gene, but entire clusters of genes working in concert, like upgrading every machine on a factory assembly line rather than swapping out a single part. A new platform developed by researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) could make that possible. Called Lytic Selection and Evolution (LySE), the system harnesses a modified bacteriophage -- a virus that infects bacteria -- to rapidly create and test many small genetic changes. It can improve long stretches of DNA (up to about 40,000 DNA letters), big enough to include most sets of genes needed for important chemical processes in cells.