Yale University students brought samples back from the Amazon a remarkable fungus that could happily munch down plastic in airless landfills.
The work is part of Yale's annual Rainforest Expedition and Laboratory, which allows students to look at diverse ecosystems by culturing endophytic microorganisms within plant tissue, according to their website. In personalized experiments the microorganisms are characterized and screened for novel biologically active natural products. In doing this the project hopes to identify new, and possibly useful, species.
Students in this year's project stumbled upon a fungus species with an appetite for polyurethane, which is considered to be a "global waste problem," Fast Company CoExist reported. The common plastic is used in household items such as shoes and garden hoses. The plastic is not biodegradable and persists for generations.
"Bioremediation is an important approach to waste reduction that relies on biological processes to break down a variety of pollutants. This is made possible by the vast metabolic diversity of the microbial world. To explore this diversity for the breakdown of plastic, we screened several dozen endophytic fungi for their ability to degrade the synthetic polymer polyester polyurethane (PUR)," the researchers wrote in the study abstract.
The students tested a number of organisms and several demonstrated the ability to degrade PUR in both solid and liquid suspensions.
Two members of the fungus genus Pestalotiopsis microspore could help take care of this growing problem. The species' survive on polyurethane alone in an oxygen-free (anaerobic) environment that is similar to conditions at the bottom of a landfill, Fast Company reported.
Student Pria Anand looked at the microbe's behavior while Jonathan Russell pinpointed the microbes that allow the organism to break down the stubborn plastic and turn it into food.
The findings were published in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology late last year.
"The broad distribution of activity observed and the unprecedented case of anaerobic growth using PUR as the sole carbon source suggest that endophytes are a promising source of biodiversity from which to screen for metabolic properties useful for bioremediation," the researchers wrote.
