Scientists discover microbes in the Alps and Arctic that can digest plastic at low temperatures frontiersin frontiersin
, where students did fieldwork to witness the effects of climate change at first hand. The soil from Switzerland had been collected on the summit of the Muot da Barba Peider and in the valley Val Lavirun, both in the canton Graubünden.
belonged to 13 genera in the phyla Actinobacteria and Proteobacteria, and the fungi to 10 genera in the phyla Ascomycota and Mucoromycota.They then used a suite of assays to screen each strain for its ability to digest sterile samples of non-biodegradable polyethylene and the biodegradable polyester-polyurethane as well as two commercially available biodegradable mixtures of polybutylene adipate terephthalate and polylactic acid .
"It was very surprising to us that we found that a large fraction of the tested strains was able to degrade at least one of the tested plastics," said Rüthi. "Microbes have been shown to produce a wide variety of polymer-degrading enzymes involved in the break-down of plant cell walls. In particular, plant-pathogenic fungi are often reported to biodegrade polyesters, because of their ability to produce cutinases which target plastic polymers due their resemblance to the plant polymer cutin," explained last author Dr. Beat Frey, a senior scientist and group leader at WSL.Since Rüthi et al.
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