{"id":168203,"date":"2023-07-24T04:23:10","date_gmt":"2023-07-24T09:23:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/07\/scientists-discover-bacteria-that-can-break-down-certain-forever-chemicals"},"modified":"2023-07-24T04:23:10","modified_gmt":"2023-07-24T09:23:10","slug":"scientists-discover-bacteria-that-can-break-down-certain-forever-chemicals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/07\/scientists-discover-bacteria-that-can-break-down-certain-forever-chemicals","title":{"rendered":"Scientists Discover Bacteria That Can Break Down Certain \u201cForever Chemicals\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/scientists-discover-bacteria-that-can-break-down-certain-forever-chemicals.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Scientists specializing in chemical and environmental engineering at the <a href=\"https:\/\/scitechdaily.com\/tag\/uc-riverside\/\">University of California, Riverside<\/a> have discovered two types of bacteria in the soil capable of breaking down a class of stubborn \u201cforever chemicals,\u201d giving hope for low-cost biological cleanup of industrial pollutants.<\/p>\n<p>Assistant Professor Yujie Men and her team at the Bourns College of Engineering have found that these bacteria are able to eradicate a specific subgroup of per-and poly-fluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS, particularly those that contain one or more chlorine atoms within their chemical structure. Their findings were published in the scientific journal, <em>Nature Water<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Unhealthful forever chemicals persist in the environment for decades or much longer because of their unusually strong carbon-to-fluorine bonds. Remarkably, the UCR team found that the bacteria cleave the pollutant\u2019s chlorine-carbon bonds, which starts a chain of reactions that destroy the forever chemical structures, rendering them harmless.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Scientists specializing in chemical and environmental engineering at the University of California, Riverside have discovered two types of bacteria in the soil capable of breaking down a class of stubborn \u201cforever chemicals,\u201d giving hope for low-cost biological cleanup of industrial pollutants. Assistant Professor Yujie Men and her team at the Bourns College of Engineering have [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,19,38,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-168203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biological","category-chemistry","category-engineering","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168203\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}