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Anonymous
Mealworms can digest polysterene 2017-04-09 05:33:58 Post No. 8814771
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Mealworms can digest polysterene 2017-04-09 05:33:58 Post No. 8814771
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http://news.stanford.edu/pr/2015/pr-worms-digest-plastics-092915.html
Hey, so i found this and ive been wondering how are they able to digest styrofoam. I came up with a hypothesis, that the meal worms enzyme which normally would break up starch into simpler sugars has mutated and changed shape just enough to be able to break up polysterene aside from starch. Im not sure how the rest of the metabolism would go though.
Anyone care to help out?
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>>8814771
Did you not read the article you posted? It says right there that bacteria in the mealworm's gut digest the polystyrene
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>>8814785
well yeah, in the same way that a cow doesnt digest starch but the microbes in its gut do. The microbes still contain enzymes, and judging by the fact that polysterene doesnt naturally occur, and they would normaly be digesting starch, they probably mutated to digest both starch and polysterene.
If you look at molecular structure of starch chains and polysterene chains they are fairly similar.
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>>8814785
also im trying to figure out how the methabolic pathway would theoretically go. How would it convert polysterene into Atp to extract energy from it. Its not a sugar afterall so what would be the end product?
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It should be noted that letting them eat this slows down their growth rate considerably. If you have a mealworm farm, you need to know that.
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>>8814790
>If you look at molecular structure of starch chains and polysterene chains they are fairly similar.
Wew lad
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>>8814797
>can only make ATP from sugar
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>>8815945
you can make ATP with things besides sugar but you'll need to generate pyruvate from them first, so he's not entirely wrong
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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24198392
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>>8815945
http://jcs.biologists.org/content/127/2/388.long
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>>8815978
pyruvate isn't sugar
>what is Acetyl-CoA?
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>>8816000
Nice
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>>8814797
There are bacteria that don't need sugars to start cellular respiration, Endorifta Persephone comes to mind for example.
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>>8815978
You do not need glucose to make the electron carriers for respiration.
>>8816002
https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3120157/Massive_Horizontal_Science_May302008.pdf
Check these crazy little guys out, they can incorporate DNA from other domains of life and conduct simultaneous insertions too. Just thought this was sort of cool because they could pick up chloroplast and plant DNA and make use of that possibly.
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>>8816169
>bacteria
You can make ATP from protein or fat
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