Chinese scientists have discovered marine microbial flora and enzymes that can effectively degrade plastic waste

Plastic waste is threatening the earth and humans more and more deeply. It not only affects the beauty of the environment, but also has potential hazards due to its cost. With the ecological cycle, it may also endanger human health.
There are many ways to prevent “white pollution”, which can reduce the generation of plastic waste from the source. For example, China issued a “plastic restriction order” in 2007. In addition, technological means can also be used to solve the problem of waste that has already been generated, such as Promote degradable plastics.

In addition, scientists have also been looking for more efficient ways to degrade plastics, hoping to deal with the generated plastic waste faster. Another very important method to treat plastic pollution is bioremediation. Bioremediation refers to the use of natural organisms to remove or neutralize pollutants. Among them, the most environmentally friendly and most promising method for plastic pollution control is the use of microbial degradation methods. Microbial degradation of plastics refers to the chemical reaction process that catalyzes the cracking of polymer bonds into monomers through some unique enzymes in microorganisms, which is a chemical reaction process that accelerates the degradation of plastics. Since plastics usually take a long time to degrade, the enzymatic catalysis can greatly reduce the time that plastics stay in nature and reduce the damage of plastics to the ecological environment. And just recently, a team from the Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences found a flora in the ocean that can effectively degrade two common plastics: PET (polyethylene terephthalate) and PE (Polyethylene) plastic. The research team also published this scientific achievement in the recent publication of JOURNAL OF HAZARDOUS MATERIALS. The results of this research are of great significance for the treatment of plastic waste. Because PET and PE plastics account for 46.5% of all plastic waste in the world, it can be said that finding a way to treat PET and PE plastics will find a way to treat nearly half of plastic pollution. PET plastic is one of the very common plastics. We can not only find it in beverage bottles, but also often see it in electrical products, automotive products, and daily life. PE (polyethylene) plastic is one of the five major synthetic resins. It is also the variety with the largest production capacity and the largest import volume among synthetic resins in China. It is often used to manufacture films, coatings and other products. What’s more troublesome is that both PET and PE compounds have many properties that are difficult to biodegrade, such as long hydrocarbon chains, high molecular weight, high tensile strength, low air permeability, and durability against physical and chemical degradation. For the degradation of PET plastic, scientists have previously discovered that cutinase, lipase, and esterase can effectively catalyze the degradation process of PET plastic. However, in current scientific research, there are relatively few discoveries about the degradation of PE plastics. Although people have found that PE plastics have great potential for degradation by co-cultivating PE plastics with specific microorganisms in the laboratory, At present, the known degradation methods of PE plastic by a single strain or a single enzyme are too low in efficiency to meet the needs of industrial applications. Therefore, in this study, the research team of the Institute of Oceanology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences targeted the degradation of microbial communities, that is, under the synergistic effect of a combination of multiple microbial species, the degradation efficiency of plastics is likely to be greatly improved. (Source: Internet) This discovery was led by Sun Chaomin, a researcher at the Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Since 2016, this team has been analyzing and screening thousands of samples of marine plastic waste collected from the coastal waters of Qingdao. These samples contain several Hundreds of plastic wastes. After unremitting screening and analysis, they found that a marine bacterial community can effectively colonize and degrade polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and polyethylene (PE), and in an environment containing plastic waste, This bacterial community has better growth ability instead. Researchers speculate that this is because the energy required for the survival of this bacterial community is obtained by degrading PET plastic and PE plastic. Next, in order to specifically find out which bacteria in the bacterial community played a role in the degradation of PET plastic and PE plastic, the researchers quantitatively analyzed the composition and abundance of this bacterial community and found that there are Five kinds of bacteria have a stronger survival advantage in the culture medium of plastic waste. Then, through bacterial culture scientific researchers successfully obtained pure culture strains of the above five types of bacteria, and further investigation found that three of them have significantly stronger plastic degradation ability. In order to further study how these three strains can work together to exert a synergistic effect and how to most effectively degrade plastics, researchers will compound the three strains in different proportions and conduct a comparative analysis. In the end, this scientific research team successfully established a stable marine bacterial community that can effectively degrade PET and PE plastics. Researchers also continue to use liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry to prove the effective degradation of the established flora for the degradation of PET plastic and PE plastic. This research not only found the microbial populations that can degrade nearly half of the plastic waste in the world, but also gave important suggestions for the industrialization of plastic waste biodegradation from a biological and mechanical point of view, which is a path for the biodegradation of plastic waste. Important milestones. -End-