她挑出其中的20种可以产生脂肪酶，其中的有三种产生的酶含量最高。

Next she put the three microbes, on a forced diet of PET she cut from strips of water bottles.

之后她将塑料水瓶裁成条状，将这三种新培养的细菌放入。

She was stunned to find the bacteria worked to digest the PET.

让她震惊的是，细菌开始分解塑料。

“It looks like it breaks it down into harmless by-products that don't do any environmental damage, so right now what it's doing is breaking down the hydrocarbons within the plastic, and then the bacteria is able to use that as food and fuel,” she said.

“看起来细菌把塑料变成了一种无害的副产品，而且对环境不会造成没有任何损坏，现在看来细菌分解塑料中碳氢化合物，细菌将其用作食物或者是燃料，“她说。

But she warned there was a “long way to go” until we will start to see the microbes eating plastic at anything like the rate useful in disposing of plastics.

不过该学生说，直到细菌分解塑料的速度能够赶上塑料被丢弃的速度，还有一段很长的路要走，

The next step, said Jay Mellies, a microbiologist who supervised MsVague's thesis, is to speed it up, improve pre-treatments on the PET to make it more palatable, and to get the bacteria to work on a variety of plastics.

该学生的论文导师、微生物学家Jay Mellies说要提高微生物的分解的速度，下一步让细菌更适合分解塑料，而且适用于各种不同的塑料。

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