Old oil-eating bacteria team up to devour plastic bottles
Edwards S, Rice D, Palomino P, Newton I, Mellies JL
Soil Health
The soil under your compost pile and garden beds is packed with microbial teamwork like this, a reminder that healthy dirt is less about any single 'super bug' and more about diverse species dividing labor to break down tough materials.
Researchers studied five bacteria living together in oily coastal soil near Galveston Bay and found they can eat plastic bottles as a team, even though none of them can do it alone. It turns out these bacteria aren't using some special new plastic-eating trick; they're repurposing old skills they already had for breaking down crude oil and handling chemical stress, with different bacteria handling different steps like an assembly line.
Key Findings
A five-strain consortium (three Pseudomonas and two Bacillus species) synergistically degrades PET plastic and uses it as sole carbon source, a trait absent in any single isolate
Bacillus strains handle biofilm formation, environmental stress tolerance, and secondary hydrolysis, while Pseudomonas strains break down aromatic monomers and neutralize oxidative stress
The consortium converts the PET breakdown product MHET nearly completely into terephthalic acid via a newly identified methylation- and redox-based pathway, alongside the standard two-step hydrolytic route
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists found that a team of five soil bacteria breaks down plastic bottles by repurposing ancient oil-eating machinery rather than evolving a brand-new plastic-digesting tool, with each bacterial species handling a different step of the job.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Ancestral hydrocarbon metabolism enables PET degradation by a natural bacterial consortium.
Plastic biodegradation in natural environments is increasingly recognized as a multi-organism process; however, the mechanisms enabling coordinated depolymerization and metabolism of polyethylene t...
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