Diversity of culturable bacteria in mudflat sediments of the Pearl River Estuary and exploitation of microplastic-degrading bacterial resources

Abstract:

Objective To explore the diversity of culturable bacteria in the mudflat sediments of the Pearl River Estuary in Guangdong Province and to mine strain resources capable of degrading microplastics from these sediments.Methods Five media were used for microbial isolation, and phylogenetic analysis was performed by MEGA-X software. The polyethylene terephthalate (PET) medium was selected to screen PET microplastic-degrading strains, and then gene function annotation was performed.Results A total of 265 bacterial strains belonging to 71 genera, 32 families of 4 phyla were isolated, including 168 (63.40%) strains of Pseudomonadota, 38 (14.34%) strains of Actinomycetota, 31 (11.70%) strains of Bacillota, and 28 (10.56%) strains of Bacteroidota. Based on the homology of 16S ribosomal RNA (16S rRNA) gene sequences, it was hypothesized that 59 of these strains might be potential new species. From the isolated strains, one PET microplastic-degrading strain was screened.Conclusion This study successfully obtained unique microbial resources from the tidal flats of Xiangzhou District, Zhuhai City and one strain capable of degrading PET and using PET as the sole carbon source.