Posted on 06/12/2024 1:25:07 PM PDT by Red Badger
Researchers have found that the marine fungus Parengyodontium album can break down polyethylene in the ocean when exposed to UV light, suggesting the presence of more plastic-degrading fungi in deeper waters. A plastic particle (red) is colonized by the marine fungus Parengyodontium album. Credit: Annika Vaksmaa/NIOZ
Researchers found that the fungus Parengyodontium album degrades UV-exposed polyethylene in the ocean, suggesting that similar fungi might also break down plastics in deeper waters.
Researchers, including those from NIOZ, have discovered that a marine fungus can decompose the plastic polyethylene after it has been exposed to UV radiation from sunlight. Their findings, published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, suggest that numerous other fungi capable of degrading plastic likely reside in the deeper regions of the ocean.
The fungus Parengyodontium album lives together with other marine microbes in thin layers on plastic litter in the ocean. Marine microbiologists from the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) discovered that the fungus is capable of breaking down particles of the plastic polyethylene (PE), the most abundant of all plastics that have ended up in the ocean. The NIOZ researchers cooperated with colleagues from Utrecht University, the Ocean Cleanup Foundation and research institutes in Paris, Copenhagen, and St Gallen, Switzerland. The finding allows the fungus to join a very short list of plastic-degrading marine fungi: only four species have been found to date. A larger number of bacteria were already known to be able to degrade plastic.
Follow the degradation process accurately
The researchers went to find the plastic-degrading microbes in the hotspots of plastic pollution in the North Pacific Ocean. From the plastic litter collected, they isolated the marine fungus by growing it in the laboratory, on special plastics that contain labeled carbon. Vaksmaa: “These so-called 13C isotopes remain traceable in the food chain. It is like a tag that enables us to follow where the carbon goes. We can then trace it in the degradation products.”
Vaksmaa is thrilled about the new finding: “What makes this research scientifically outstanding, is that we can quantify the degradation process.” In the laboratory, Vaksmaa and her team observed that the breakdown of PE by P. album occurs at a rate of about 0.05 percent per day. “Our measurements also showed that the fungus doesn’t use much of the carbon coming from the PE when breaking it down. Most of the PE that P. album uses is converted into carbon dioxide, which the fungus excretes again.” Although CO2 is a greenhouse gas, this process is not something that might pose a new problem: the amount released by fungi is the same as the low amount humans release while breathing.
Only under the influence of UV
The presence of sunlight is essential for the fungus to use PE as an energy source, the researchers found. Vaksmaa: “In the lab, P. album only breaks down PE that has been exposed to UV-light at least for a short period of time. That means that in the ocean, the fungus can only degrade plastic that has been floating near the surface initially,” explains Vaksmaa. “It was already known that UV-light breaks down plastic by itself mechanically, but our results show that it also facilitates the biological plastic breakdown by marine fungi.”
Other fungi out there
As a large amount of different plastics sink into deeper layers before it is exposed to sunlight, P.album will not be able to break them all down. Vaksmaa expects that there are other, yet unknown, fungi out there that are degrading plastic as well, in deeper parts of the ocean. “Marine fungi can break down complex materials made of carbon. There are numerous amounts of marine fungi, so it is likely that in addition to the four species identified so far, other species also contribute to plastic degradation. There are still many questions about the dynamics of how plastic degradation takes place in deeper layers,” says Vaksmaa.
Plastic soup
Finding plastic-degrading organisms is urgent. Every year, humans produce more than 400 billion kilograms of plastic, and this is expected to have at least triple by the year 2060. Much of the plastic waste ends up in the sea: from the poles to the tropics, it floats around in surface waters, reaches greater depths at sea, and eventually falls down on the seafloor.
Lead author Annika Vaksmaa of NIOZ: “Large amounts of plastics end up in subtropical gyres, ring-shaped currents in oceans in which seawater is almost stationary. That means once the plastic has been carried there, it gets trapped there. Some 80 million kilograms of floating plastic have already accumulated in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre in the Pacific Ocean alone, which is only one of the six large gyres worldwide.”
Reference:
“Biodegradation of polyethylene by the marine fungus Parengyodontium album” by A. Vaksmaa, H. Vielfaure, L. Polerecky, M.V.M. Kienhuis, M.T.J. van der Meer, T. Pflüger, M. Egger and H. Niemann, 26 April 2024, Science of The Total Environment.
DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.172819
Been postulated for at least one sci-fi novel....civilization is knocked back to the 19th century by an organism that eats plastic insulation on wires.
I see a new Godzilla movie in the works!
Congratulations, P. album. You’re hired!
There’s a fungus among us.
While the “discovery” in this article may be new, there is nothing new about bugs eating petroleum and hydrocarbons.
I remember when the Deepwater Horizon oil spill occurred. There were ‘scientists’ who tried to questimate the total amount of oil that was released into the Gulf. After they determined an amount, they set off to find the huge underwater oil plumes and surface oil. There was much less than expected. What real scientists found were huuuuge plumes of microorganisms that eat, yes eat, oil. A massive (more than huuuuge) amount of oil naturally seeps into the oceans from the ocean floor. IT’S PART OF THE EARTH. It is food for some parts of the Earth.
A quick search finds much information on our little buddies that dine on petroleum and plastic.
“”Natural and synthetic plastics are degraded by the action of microorganisms including bacteria, actinomycetes, and fungi (Ishigaki et al., 2004; Alshehrei, 2017).””
every party has at least one fungi!
kinda hoping this bacteria eats another plastic variant, i.e. Democrats.
I’m not interested in killing anyone.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
How profound. Was that your personal creation?
Look out for gain of function science.
Doorways (1993) was a proposed science fiction pilot that was never picked up. A mysterious alien feral woman appears on a freeway and after causing an accident with her weapon is taken to a hospital where she and the doctor that treated her eventually jump between alternate Earths to flee from the alien overlords who are chasing the alien woman.
They end up in a world where, 15 years ago, a microbe gene was created to clean up an oil spill, but it ate all petroleum in the world. They hitch a ride on a wagon (an Airstream trailer pulled by draft horses) with Jake (Hoyt Axton) and his granddaughter Cissy (Tisha Putman), who give them a ride to the nearest truck stop.The pilot is on Prime video, or video on the link which I started with the pair of protagonist are hitching a ride on the Airstream trailer.
So what does it poop then? Nylon?
The starting event sounds exactly like the one in the book except that bacteria mutated and began to eat everything made with oil so all plastic, nylon and so forth. The end result was the release of all the germs in laboratories resulting it "wild deenas (DNA)" causing runaway mutations.
“eats plastic insulation on wires”
Mice and rats are doing a fine job of that today.
Shred and make a slurry in salt water. Expose to UV. Innoculate with fungus.
On Land, Mealworms eat polystyrene.
Biodegradation and Mineralization of Polystyrene by Plastic-Eating Mealworms: Part 1. Chemical and Physical Characterization and Isotopic Tests "Polystyrene (PS) is generally considered to be durable and resistant to biodegradation. Mealworms (the larvae of Tenebrio molitor Linnaeus) from different sources chew and eat Styrofoam, a common PS product. The Styrofoam was efficiently degraded in the larval gut within a retention time of less than 24 h. Fed with Styrofoam as the sole diet, the larvae lived as well as those fed with a normal diet (bran) over a period of 1 month. The analysis of fecula egested from Styrofoam-feeding larvae, using gel permeation chromatography (GPC), solid-state 13C cross-polarization/magic angle spinning nuclear magnetic resonance (CP/MAS NMR) spectroscopy, and thermogravimetric Fourier transform infrared (TG–FTIR) spectroscopy, substantiated that cleavage/depolymerization of long-chain PS molecules and the formation of depolymerized metabolites occurred in the larval gut. Within a 16 day test period, 47.7% of the ingested Styrofoam carbon was converted into CO2 and the residue (ca. 49.2%) was egested as fecula with a limited fraction incorporated into biomass (ca. 0.5%). Tests with α 13C- or β 13C-labeled PS confirmed that the 13C-labeled PS was mineralized to 13CO2 and incorporated into lipids. The discovery of the rapid biodegradation of PS in the larval gut reveals a new fate for plastic waste in the environment."
Not sure if you want to feed it to your reptiles or use them to make "Insect Protein Meal"!
So do fire ants, I've read.
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