However, those molecules would also have to be tested to make sure they aren’t also toxic. “We’re not going to solve every problem with one magic bacterium,” says Lawrence Wackett at the University of Minnesota.īut understanding how these molecules break down could help researchers design alternatives to PFAS that biodegrade more readily by incorporating more of these chlorine “weak points”, he says. They then replace the chlorine with an oxygen and hydrogen group, which destabilises the molecule and makes it more likely for the fluorine bond to break.īreaking down chlorinated PFAS wouldn’t do anything to address the contamination from many other types of PFAS that don’t contain chlorine. In Broken (in the bests possible way), Jenny brings listeners along on her mental and physical health journey, offering heartbreaking and hilarious anecdotes along the way. Broken (in the Best Possible Way) - by Jenny Lawson 13. 892 likes, 88 comments - Chris van der Walt (christhundervolt) on Instagram: 'duncanbentley is probably gonna try and remove this everywhere.

Instead, they cleave the weaker bonds between carbon and chlorine. In Broken (in the bests possible way), Jenny brings listeners along on her mental and physical health journey, offering heartbreaking and hilarious anecdotes along the way. The bacteria don’t break the tough carbon-fluorine bond directly, says Men. Similar microbes could already be breaking down chlorinated PFAS contamination, she says. 892 likes, 88 comments - Chris van der Walt (christhundervolt) on Instagram: 'duncanbentley is probably gonna try and remove this everywhere. 'Broken' was written before the world was, well, broken by COVID-19, so in the printed book, the pandemic is not addressed. Their genomes were most similar to Desulfovibrio aminophilus and Sporomusa sphaeroides, bacterial species commonly found in water environments. The researchers isolated the bacteria responsible for breaking down the molecules in anaerobic conditions.

Broken in the best possible way