Abstract
Polyurethane (PU) is a versatile plastic that boasts high environmental resistance. The biodegradation of PU has become a hot topic of research aimed at finding ways to potentially solve PU pollutants. Identifying microorganisms capable of efficiently degrading PU plastics is pivotal for the development of a green recycling process for PU. This study aimed to isolate and characterize PU-degrading fungi from the soil of a waste transfer station in Luoyang, China. We isolated four different fungal strains from the soil. Among the isolates, the P2072 and P2073 strains were identified as Rhizopus oryzae (internal transcribed spacer identity, 99.66%) and Alternaria alternata (internal transcribed spacer identity, 99.81%), respectively, through microscopic, morphologic, as well as 18S rRNA sequencing. The degradation ability of strains P2072 and P2073 was analyzed through measurement of weight loss, and they exhibited a degradation rate of 2.7% and 3.3%, respectively, for the PU films after 2 months’ growth in mineral salt medium (MSM) with PU films as the sole carbon source. In addition, the P2073 strain exhibited protease activity in the presence of PU. To our knowledge, R. oryzae has never been reported as a PU-degrading fungus. This study provides a new perspective on the biodegradation of PU.
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Data availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Funding
This study was supported in part by the Science and Technology Plan Projects of Henan Province (No. 202102310602); Natural Science Foundation of Henan Province of China (No. 232300420446); the Applied Science and Technology Research Project of Luoyang Normal University (No. 2018-YYJJ-003); the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Training Program for College Students of Henan (No. 202210482061). 2022 Henan Entrepreneurship Training Program for College Students (No. 17).
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TXY and XYY: designed the study. KYW and MY: has done the experiments, data collection and written the paper. XL and XDC: has analyzed the data. JQW and LT: has done part of the experiment and corrected the manuscript. All the authors reviewed and approved the final version of the paper.
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Communicated by Yusuf Akhter.
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Wu, KY., Yang, TX., Yang, M. et al. Preliminary identification of soil fungi for the degradation of polyurethane film. Arch Microbiol 205, 145 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00203-023-03491-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00203-023-03491-2