Bacteria Helping Clean Up Water: The Case of Bacillus subtilis

Did you know that certain bacteria can help clean our water? One such bacteria is Bacillus subtilis, or B. subtilis for short. This little guy is special because it can trap tiny plastic particles, known as nanoplastics, while also processing nitrogen compounds in water. Scientists have been studying how well B. subtilis can do this job. Using powerful microscopes, they found that B. subtilis can indeed trap these tiny plastics. Most of the time, these plastics cluster around the bacteria. By using a technique called flow cytometry, they discovered that at a certain concentration, about 73. 7% of these plastic particles change their state in the environment. As the concentration of these plastic particles increases, the complexity of B. subtilis also increases. This means the bacteria are working harder to deal with more plastics. The bacteria also produce more of a gooey substance called extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) to help trap the plastics. But how do these plastics affect the bacteria? Well, different concentrations of these plastic particles affect the bacteria's ability to process nitrogen compounds in various ways. Sometimes, the bacteria's ability to process these compounds goes up, and sometimes, it goes down. These findings suggest that B. subtilis could be used in water treatment processes to help clean up our water. But more research is needed to understand how best to use these bacteria for this purpose.