Year 2024 Marine fungus that eats plastic.

Plastic pollution in the marine realm is a severe environmental problem. Nevertheless, plastic may also serve as a potential carbon and energy source for microbes, yet the contribution of marine microbes, especially marine fungi to plastic degradation is not well constrained. We isolated the fungus Parengyodontium album from floating plastic debris in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre and measured fungal-mediated mineralization rates (conversion to CO₂) of polyethylene (PE) by applying stable isotope probing assays with ¹³ C-PE over 9 days of incubation. When the PE was pretreated with UV light, the biodegradation rate of the initially added PE was 0.044%/day. Furthermore, we traced the incorporation of PE-derived ¹³ C carbon into P. album biomass using nanoSIMS and fatty acid analysis.