Multi-omic Investigation of Plastic-Associated Microbes: Bioinformatic Insights into Plastic Biodegradation and Novel Degrading Genes Across Environments

Synthetic plastics and their resulting waste are ubiquitous across the planet, from the Arctic to the tropics. Despite increasing efforts to understand the fate and transport of these plastics, their fate and impact on the environment and public health are still not well understood. To better comprehend the microbial ecology associated with plastic waste and its potential for bioremediation, we conducted a large-scale analysis of all publicly available meta-omic studies investigating plastics in the environment. Importantly, we observed low prevalence of previously reported plastic degrading populations throughout most environments, except for substantial enrichment in riverine systems. This indicates rivers may be the one of the most promising environments for sources of plastic bioremediation. Ocean samples associated with degrading plastics showed clear differentiation from non-degrading polymers, showing enrichment of novel putative biodegrading taxa in the degraded samples. In regards to plastisphere pathogenicity, we observe no association between virulence factors and plastics in any environment. Additionally, we report a co-occurrence network analysis of 10+ million proteins associated with the plastisphere. This analysis revealed a localized sub-region enriched with known and putative plastizymes. These novel putative plastizymes may be useful for deeper investigations of nature’s ability to biodegrade man-made plastics. Finally, the combined data from our meta-analysis was used to construct a publicly available database. These data should allow for integrated exploration of the microbial plastisphere and aid the community in continued research efforts to better understand the fate of plastics in the environment.

Level thesis:degree_level

Masters

Department dc:contributor.department

Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Georgia Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Ridley, Rodney S.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Konstantinidis, Kostas T.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Brettmann, Blair
• DiChristina, Thomas

• Plastics
• microbes
• biodegradation
• plastic degradation
• PET
• PLA
• PE
• polyethylene
• microplastics
• bioinformatics
• metagenomics
• metatranscriptomices
• plastic genomes

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1853/76755

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repository.gatech.edu:1853/76755