Ludmilla Aristilde

Now, what makes it really hard is actually breaking it because plastic is a polymer.

So polymer is a repeat of the same unit over and over again.

And it's hard to break because the mycos, what they eat, it's something like sugar or something that is more simpler than a polymer.

So in order for a microbe to be able to eat a polymer like a plastic, they first have to break it down into really small pieces and break that down into smaller pieces and then be able to get something that is able to, they can digest.

Yes.

Yes, so in my work specifically, I can give an example.

It was observed in the environment.

If you find like plastics pellets or microplastics, so microplastics are part of the smaller fragments that I'm talking about.

So they're smaller than the original material.

And what was reported in the environment, people have observed a certain community of bacteria

they were seeing to be consistently enriched on these microplastics.

So then in my lab, we're like, okay, if they're enriching on these small pieces of plastic, then they were found in multiple rivers in city, like urban rivers.

So we asked the question, is it possible that they enrich, you know, these communities of microbes that enrich on these plastics because they can potentially use it as food?

And that's how...

we went into this kind of path to try to figure this out.

And the bacteria that we were specifically working on were isolated from wastewater.

So wastewater has a lot of plastics in it.

So typically natural microbes that are isolated to eat plastics are almost always isolated in places where you do have a lot of plastics to begin with, because then the microbes don't have their natural food source.

So then they have to rely on the fact that, well, the only thing I have around

is this plastic.