there's no reason to think there would be no pressure to evolve to eat the monomers once they're there and to adapt the gene for the enzymes from 'professional use' to 'personal use' by the bugs.

I directly address this evolutionary pressure and why there are, in fact, reasons to think it won't behave like lignin digestion in the very comment youre responding to friend.

Lignin digestion is at the end of the day just a random set of mutations that stuck because they were useful. If they weren't useful, to an individual organisms survival, they likely wouldn't stick around, as might be the case with plastic digestion, and would be different fur every single plastic. The same exact method would be used for adding enzymes to their genome in yeasts as you mention or in various organisms for plastic digestion.

[–] SpiderShoeCult@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's a fair view that something forcefully introduced by us would be more of an appendix than a fully integrated digestion-feeding system, I'll agree to that. I guess I'm being overly optimistic in my assessment regarding the integration of such a mutation in stable populations and the link from digestion to feeding.

[–] Umbrias@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

Practically, we would try to predict this for each enzyme we introduce, and wed get it wrong sometimes and right other times, some plastics might prove to be very tasty others might not. But in general I'd lean towards most plastic probably not getting natural decomposers, personally, but maybe!