Speed 'training' prepares bacteria for complex tasks, like munching plastics

Millions of tons of plastic waste accumulate in landfills and oceans every year. One promising response is to engineer microbes to break the plastic down into useful chemical building blocks. However, teaching a bacterium to digest plastic efficiently demands fine-tuning not just one gene, but entire clusters of genes working in concert, like upgrading every machine on a factory assembly line rather than swapping out a single part.