PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Ruth-Sarah Rose
AU  - Katherine H. Richardson
AU  - Elmeri Johannes Latvanen
AU  - China A. Hanson
AU  - Marina Resmini
AU  - Ian A. Sanders
TI  - Microbial degradation of plastic in aqueous solutions demonstrated by CO<sub>2</sub> evolution and quantification
AID  - 10.1101/719476
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 719476
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/12/16/719476.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/12/16/719476.full
AB  - The environmental accumulation of plastics worldwide is a consequence of the durability of the material. Alternative polymers, marketed as biodegradable, present a potential solution to mitigate their ecological damage. However, understanding of biodegradability has been hindered by a lack of reproducible testing methods. Here, we present a new approach to assess biodegradability by monitoring bacterial respiration, in an aqueous media supplemented with a polymer as a single carbon source. Rhodococcus rhodochrous and Alcanivorax borkumensis are good model organisms for soil and marine systems respectively, allowing simulations of plastic biodegradation in these key environments. We demonstrate that polymer molecular weight reduction is the critical factor in the biodegradability of low-density polyethylene. Additionally, we tested a wide variety of plastics, including environmentally weathered and laboratory aged samples, using the same method allowing direct comparisons of the relative biodegradability of various polymers.