RESEARCHERS ENGINEER BACTERIA TO PRODUCE PLASTICS

Summary from the TLDR newsletter

A team of Korean researchers has engineered a bacterial strain that can make useful polymers starting with nothing but glucose for fuel. The system can be tweaked to incorporate a huge range of chemicals into a variety of polymers. The resulting plastic can be tuned across many properties. There are still some issues, as the process doesn't allow complete control over what gets added into the polymer - the scientists couldn't stop enzymes from mixing random chemicals from the cells' metabolism into the polymers - and the polymers still need to be purified from the rest of the cell components before being used in manufacturing.