Plastic-Eating Worms
吃塑料的蠕虫
Humans produce more than 300 million tons of plastic every year. Almost half of that winds up in landfills， and up to 12 million tons pollute the oceans. So far there is no effective way to get rid of it, but a new study suggests an answer may lie in the stomachs of some hungry worms.
人类每年生产超过3亿吨塑料，其中几乎一半被作为垃圾填埋， 多达1200万吨污染海洋。目前还没有有效的方法来消除它，但一项新的研究表明，答案可能在于一些饥饿蠕虫的胃。
Researchers in Spain and England recently found that the worms of the greater wax moth can break down polyethylene, which accounts for 40% of plastics. The team left 100 wax worms on a commercial polyethylene shopping bag for 12 hours, and the worms consumed and broke down about 92 milligrams, or almost 3% of it. To confirm that the worms' chewing alone was not responsible for the polyethylene breakdown, the researchers made some worms into paste and applied it to plastic films. 14 hours later the films had lost 13% of their mass--apparently broken down by enzymes from the worms' stomachs. Their findings were published in Current Biology in 2017.
西班牙和英国的研究人员最近发现，大蜡螟的蠕虫可以分解聚乙烯，聚乙烯占塑料的40%。研究小组将100只蜡虫蠕虫放在一个商用聚乙烯购物袋中12小时，这些蠕虫消耗并分解了约92毫克，约占总量的3%。为了证实蠕虫的咀嚼并不是聚乙烯分解的原因，研究人员将一些蠕虫制成糊状物并将其放置于塑料薄膜。14小时后，这些胶片失去了13%的质量——显然被蠕虫胃里的酶分解了。他们的发现发表在2017年的《当代生物学》上。
Federica Bertocchini, co-author of the study, says the worms' ability to break down their everyday food-beeswax--also allows them to break down plastic. "Wax is a complex mixture, but the basic bond in polyethylene, the carbon-carbon bond, is there as well, "she explains. "The wax worm evolved a method or system to break this bond. "
这项研究的合著者费德丽卡·贝尔托基尼说，蠕虫分解日常食物——蜂蜡的能力，也可以让它们分解塑料。“蜡是一种复杂的混合物，但聚乙烯中的基本键——碳碳键——也存在，”她解释道，“蜡虫进化出一种方法或系统来破坏这种键。”
Jennifer Debruyn, a microbiologist at the University of Tennessee, who was not involved in the study, says it is not surprising that such worms can break down polyethylene. But compared with previous studies, she finds the speed of breaking down in this one exciting. The next step, DeBruyn says, will be to identify the cause of the breakdown. Is it an enzyme produced by the worm itself or by its gut microbes?
田纳西大学的微生物学家詹妮弗·德布鲁恩没有参与这项研究，她说，这种蠕虫可以破坏聚乙烯，这并不奇怪。但与之前的研究相比，她发现这次研究的分解速度令人兴奋。德布鲁恩说，下一步将是确定分解原因。这种酶是由蠕虫自身产生还是肠道微生物产生？
Bertocchini agrees and hopes her team’s findings might one day help employ the enzyme to break down plastics in landfills. But she expects using the chemical in some kind of industrial process-not simply "millions of worms thrown on top of the plastic.”
贝尔托基尼对此表示同意，并希望她的研究小组的发现有朝一日能利用这种酶在垃圾填埋场分解塑料。但她希望在某种工业过程中使用这种化学物质，而不仅仅是将“数百万只蠕虫扔在塑料上”。
