Journal
MARINE POLLUTION BULLETIN
Volume 179, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.marpolbul.2022.113701
Keywords
Plastisphere; Marine plastic debris; Microbiome; Microbial community succession; Polypropylene
Funding
- MIBTP PhD scholarship [BB/M01116X/1]
- NERC Independent Research Fellowship [NE/K009044/1, RYC-2017-22452, PID2019-109509RB-I00]
- (ESF Investing in your future?) [NE/S005501/1]
- NERC [NE/L002493/1]
- Waitrose & Partners Association of Commonwealth Universities Blue Charter Fellowship
- Immunity, Inflammation and Vaccinology Dalhousie Medical Research Foundation Dr. David H. Hubel Postdoctoral Fellowship
- NERC CENTA DTP studentship
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This study reveals that microorganisms immediately colonize plastics upon entering coastal marine environments, with members of the Bacteroidetes group being the pioneer colonizers. Their presence is later replaced by other groups and the eukaryotic community on plastics exposed to sunlight also undergoes changes.
Plastics, when entering the environment, are immediately colonised by microorganisms. This modifies their physico-chemical properties as well as their transport and fate in natural ecosystems, but whom pioneers this colonisation in marine ecosystems? Previous studies have focused on microbial communities that develop on plastics after relatively long incubation periods (i.e., days to months), but very little data is available regarding the earliest stages of colonisation on buoyant plastics in marine waters (i.e., minutes or hours). We conducted a preliminary study where the earliest hours of microbial colonisation on buoyant plastics in marine coastal waters were investigated by field incubations and amplicon sequencing of the prokaryotic and eukaryotic communities. Our results show that members of the Bacteroidetes group pioneer microbial attachment to plastics but, over time, their presence is masked by other groups - Gammaproteobacteria at first and later by Alphaproteobacteria. Interestingly, the eukaryotic community on plastics exposed to sunlight became dominated by phototrophic organisms from the phylum Ochrophyta, diatoms at the start and brown algae towards the end of the three-day incubations. This study defines the pioneering microbial community that colonises plastics immediately when entering coastal marine environments and that may set the seeding Plastisphere of plastics in the oceans.
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