Rodney Ridley
BioE M.S. Defense
August 10th, 2023
12:00 PM
Location: ES&T L1175
Committee:
Kostas Konstantinidis, Ph.D. (Advisor) (School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology)
Blair Brettmann, Ph.D. (School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology)
Thomas DiChristina, Ph.D. (School of Biological Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology)
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 impact on the environment and public health is 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 between non-degrading polymers, showing enrichment for novel putative biodegrading taxa. 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 shows 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 this 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.