Evaluating the plastic degrading potential of bacterial isolates from a dumping site in Varanasi Garg Jancy1, Paul Subhadip2, Rakshit Amitava1,* 1Department of Soil Science and Agricultural Chemistry, Institute of Agricultural Sciences, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi-221005, Uttar Pradesh, India 2Division of Soil Science and Agricultural Chemistry, ICAR-Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi-110012, India *Corresponding author email id: amitavar@bhu.ac.in
Abstract Varanasi is under heavy threat from waste dumping activities. Thus, present investigation intended to evaluate microbe-mediated plastic degradation. Three bacterial isolates from a municipal waste-dumping site of Varanasi were tested in both laboratories (minimal media; with and without glucose), and pots (with soils from Entisol, Inceptisol, and Alfisol; 15 cm depth) for their plastic degrading activities. The highest weight loss of plastics occurred in Entisol due to its higher soil available phosphorus content. Among the isolates, PDM-2 showed the highest (P< 0.05) plastic decomposition capacity (except Alfisol) due to higher activities of extracellular esterase. Incubation with minimal media revealed that in the presence of glucose, plastic degradation was very negligible. The morphological investigation of those colonies and subsequent biochemical tests indicated that those three isolates resembled the biochemical characteristics of Bacillus subtilis (PDM-1), Pseudomonas aeruginosa (PDM-2) and Staphylococcus aureus (PDM-3). Top Keywords Bacterial isolates, Esterase activity, Minimal media, Plastic degradation. Top |