A team of Australian scientists is genetically engineering a common fly species so it can eat more of humanity’s organic waste while producing ingredients for making everything from lubricants and biofuels to high-grade animal feed.
Black soldier flies are already used commercially to digest organic waste, including food waste, but tweaking their genetics could broaden the variety of waste their larvae consume while producing fatty compounds and enzymes in the process.
In a scientific articlethe team based at Sydney’s Macquarie University outlined their hopes for the flies and how they could also reduce the amount of planet-warming methane produced when organic waste breaks down.
“We are heading for a climate disaster, and landfills are releasing methane. We need to get it to zero,” said Dr Kate Tepper, a lead author of the paper.
Dr Maciej Maselko runs a laboratory for animal synthetic biology at Macquarie University where Tepper has already started producing the flies.
Maselko said insects will be the “next frontier” in dealing with the planet’s waste management problem, which in food waste alone weighs about 1 billion tons a year.
Black soldier flies are found on all continents except Antarctica. “If you have a compost bin, then you probably have some,” Maselko said.
The fly larvae can eat double their body weight per day and, like other insects, their larvae are used for livestock feed. Maselko said the flies can already do the job of consuming waste faster than microbes.
Scientists are looking for ways to create circular economies, where waste is transformed from a problem to become part of a process of reuse and income generation.
The university team created a spin-off company, EntoZyme, to commercialize their work and hope to have the first genetically engineered flies for use in waste facilities by the end of the year.
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But could the flies escape and cause unknown risks to the environment? Maselko said that as part of the genetic engineering, the flies can also be given weaknesses – such as an inability to fly – that make them unviable outside of a waste processing facility.
The work of eating organic waste is done when the fly is in the maggot stage. The maggots, which then turn into pupae, are harvested.
By creating a series of genetically engineered flies, they will also produce enzymes used in animal feed, textiles and pharmaceuticals, and fatty compounds that can be used to make biofuels and lubricants.
Another suggested use is that some flies may consume infected waste, which then leaves behind their poo that can be used as fertilizer.
The research and proposal is published in the journal Communications Biology.
