Bacterial co-cultivation for the degradation of polystyrene plastics

Abstract

Polystyrene (PS) is a polyolefin plastic that is used extensively in food packaging. The chemical structure of PS is extremely stable owing to its C-C backbone and styrene rings, making it highly resistant to biodegradation, which causes serious environmental pollution and health threats. Although certain microorganisms have been reported to degrade PS waste, most studies have focused on the changes in the molecular weight and surface structure of plastics. These slight degradation phenomena make it extremely difficult to detect the degradation products, thus challenging the definitive demonstration of PS degradation. This study investigated the co-cultivation of the polyolefin plastic-degrading bacterium Raoultella sp. DY2415 and the benzoic acid bioconversion strain Pseudomonas putida KT2440-ΔRBC. BA is a possible degradation product of PS and can be converted by P. putida KT2440-ΔRBC into the high value-added compound muconic acid (MA). After co-cultivation, MA was detected in the medium, indicating that Raoultella sp. DY2415 degraded PS and generated BA, which was subsequently utilized by P. putida KT2440-ΔRBC for MA synthesis. This study demonstrated the biodegradation of PS and the synthesis of MA through a fully biological process, thereby promoting the circular economy of plastics.

Keywords

Polystyrene / Biodegradation / Environmental pollution / Plastic package / Co-cultivation

Data Availability Statement

The data supporting the findings of this study are included in the published article as well as in the Supplementary Materials available online.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Yingbo Yuan: Writing - original draft, Resources, Methodology, Investigation, Conceptualization. Tianyuan Su: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Validation, Funding acquisition. Yi Zheng: Methodology. Baoyue Liu: Methodology. Yuanfei Han: Methodology. Zhongcan Wang: Methodology. Quanfeng Liang: Writing - review & editing, Resources, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization. Longyang Dian: Writing - review & editing, Funding acquisition. Qingsheng Qi: Writing - review & editing, Validation, Resources, Conceptualization.

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2021YFC2103600), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 32200081), the Young Taishan Scholars Program of Shandong Province (tsqn202103019, tsqn202312029), the Overseas Excellent Young Scientists Fund Program of Shandong Province (2022HWYQ003), the Collaborative Research Program of the Alliance of International Science Organizations (grant no. ANSO-CR-PP-2022-01), SKLMT Frontiers and Challenges Project (SKLMTFCP-2023-02).

We thank Sen Wang, Jingyao Qu and Haiyan Sui of the Core facilities for Life and Environmental Science, State Key Laboratory of Microbial Technology of Shandong University for the assistance in SEM analysis (Quanta 250 FEG, FEI, USA).

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