Laura Tran in The Scientist:
Plastic pollution has spread across the land and into the deepest parts of the ocean. Many plastics contain additives such as phthalic acid esters (PAEs), which act as plasticizers to make materials more flexible. But as plastic waste accumulates, these chemicals can leach into the environment, where they have been linked to endocrine disruption.
Although researchers have identified microbes capable of breaking down plastics, using them to clean polluted environments has proved challenging. Microbial digestion is often slow, it sometimes requires extreme temperatures, and many strains can degrade only a single type of plastic. In principle, a combination of different species with an appetite for plastic could tackle bioremediation more effectively than any one microbe alone.
Motivated by this idea, researchers from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) studied how a bacterial consortium might collectively degrade plastics. Their findings, published in Frontiers in Microbiology, showed that three bacterial species work together by ‘cross-feeding,’ where one microbe releases metabolic byproducts that another takes up as nutrients, to break down PAEs.1 Alone, these microbes could not degrade plastic. “Introducing these bacteria into polluted natural environments, a process known as bioaugmentation, could potentially help reduce PAE contamination in real-world settings,” said coauthor and microbiologist Hermann Heipieper at UFZ, in a press release.
More here.
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