A little introduction...
Marine plastics, can microbes "eat" them?
(Picture: California, USA. Taken by me.)
I'm Robyn, a PhD student at the University of Warwick. I'm currently in the second year of my PhD research, and will be finishing in September 2019.
I'm looking for marine microbes that can "eat" plastics, and hope that this could lead to solutions to - or at least a wider understanding of - our ocean plastic problem.
By 2050, it is predicted that there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean. We often hear on the news that plastics will take hundreds of years to break down in the ocean, but in reality, we don't know how long it will take, or even if it can happen at all. As far as we know, plastics fragment into smaller and smaller pieces, but will never truly disappear without biodegradation.
I'm using a method, artificial selection, that resembles the way that different crop plants or breeds of dogs are produced, only using whole communities of microorganisms rather than a single plant or dog. I want to see if we can produce communities of microorganisms that are better at degrading plastics than those that naturally occur in the oceans, by speeding up the natural process of evolution.
To do this, I combine the communities of microorganisms that are best at degrading plastics to make new communities. I grow lots of these, and then again combine the best of these, repeating this over lots of generations. Hopefully, over some time, these will become progressively better at degrading plastics. As I already mentioned, nobody knows right now whether they can degrade plastics, so there's not a quick, easy way to tell if they are degrading plastics - but I can try to test a few measures of whether they may be good at degrading plastics, or even if they are growing at all with the plastics as their only "food" source.
If this works, it will provide proof that microbes in the oceans may be able to one day evolve the ability to "eat" plastics in the ocean.