Taken Aurally

I, knowing that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity, waited carefully for the lab director to be deep in conversation with someone else on the other side of the laboratory. And then I took my chance.

Test tubes, as it turns out, are really bad as shot glasses. Their shape turns any liquid inside into a stream, so you really can't knock it back quickly - it takes a couple seconds. Additionally, the best way I can describe the taste of virus concentrate was "sterile rot". A very unique kind of bad! Made worse by the test tube's inefficiency as a shot glass.

(by the way we were studying bacteriophages, not animal viruses. these viruses are too specialized on attacking prokaryotes to even recognize our cells as targets at all, according to studies.)

(but also like. if the viruses managed to successfully switch hosts and killed me with a violent infection, itd still be worth it.)

For my project, we were trying to identify microbes that could use partially treated plastic as a food source and break it down further. The carbon bonds in our daily plastics are really hard to get at and break, hence the bad degradation, so breaking some of those bonds through heat and chemicals first can help microbes get access to them. Once we identify a microbe that can do this, we could test giving them slightly less degraded plastic to live on until they develop a way to eat it and go until they either get back to normal plastic or hit a wall where the microbe can't progress anymore (which may be likely).

An alternative approach to breeding (although you don't 'breed' most microbes since they reproduce asexually but instead find strains with mutations that lead to desired changes) would be trying to predict an enzyme that could break the bonds in plastic, engineering it, and putting it in microbes to test if it works. On one hand it could overcome any natural halt selection has but would be initially harder to discover.

The best solution would probably be to find the microbe that can eat the partially degraded plastic, figure out what enzyme is doing the work, then see how the enzyme could be improved to work through plastic in its default state.

Once you have that, the next consideration would be what byproducts are created from eating plastic? Part of the project was hoping that the microbe that could eat plastic would produce a useful byproduct that could be harvested, as an unfortunate reality of our current world is that if it's not profitable it probably won't take hold. But if we wish to put this in a living organism, we need to make sure it won't produce a harmful byproduct, or if it does, then ensuring the organism can quickly turn it harmless before it builds up.

Once all of that is figured out, the next hardest thing would be ensuring that whatever gut microbe you put the plastic eating gene in continues to express it. Since plastic is so hard to use it would probably prefer to use any glucose lying around first, and if that runs out then switch to eating plastic. We could try removing its ability to eat glucose (or whatever other compounds it lives off of), but then it would be less competitive in the gut environment and would require a steady source of plastic in order to not die off.

They do also have eyes, and their vision is actually pretty acute. But their optic and mechanic sensory inputs aren't integrated together like electro-mechanic sense is. So they have these two fairly sophisticated sensory complexes that Barely talk to each other.

No wonder they try to bring the two inputs together in their environment then; picking things up and turning them around allows them to apply both their mechanical and optical senses to the object. They're just trying to make up for a deficiency of neural organisation.