{"id":206880,"date":"2025-02-20T20:11:40","date_gmt":"2025-02-21T02:11:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/02\/artificial-worm-gut-breaks-down-plastics"},"modified":"2025-02-20T20:11:40","modified_gmt":"2025-02-21T02:11:40","slug":"artificial-worm-gut-breaks-down-plastics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/02\/artificial-worm-gut-breaks-down-plastics","title":{"rendered":"Artificial \u2018worm gut\u2019 breaks down plastics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"display: block; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; aspect-ratio: 4\/3; object-fit: contain;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/kLhO_zVk9Uc?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope;\n   picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>A team of scientists from <strong>Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) <\/strong>has developed an artificial \u2018worm gut\u2019 to break down plastics, offering hope for a nature-inspired method to tackle the global plastic pollution problem.<\/p>\n<p>By feeding worms with plastics and cultivating microbes found in their guts, researchers from <strong>NTU\u2019s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE)<\/strong> and <strong>Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering (SCELSE) <\/strong>have demonstrated a new method to accelerate plastic biodegradation.<\/p>\n<p>Previous studies have shown that Zophobas atratus worms \u2013 the larvae of the darkling beetle commonly sold as pet food and known as \u2018superworms\u2019 for their nutritional value \u2013 can survive on a diet of plastic because its gut contains bacteria capable of breaking down common types of plastic. However, their use in plastics processing has been impractical due to the slow rate of feeding and worm maintenance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A team of scientists from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) has developed an artificial \u2018worm gut\u2019 to break down plastics, offering hope for a nature-inspired method to tackle the global plastic pollution problem. By feeding worms with plastics and cultivating microbes found in their guts, researchers from NTU\u2019s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":579,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1902,3,1506],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-206880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bioengineering","category-biological","category-food"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206880","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\/579"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206880"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206880\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}