{"id":233543,"date":"2026-03-18T02:22:17","date_gmt":"2026-03-18T07:22:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/a-consortium-of-bacteria-cooperates-to-eat-phthalate-plasticizers-that-single-microbes-cant-stomach"},"modified":"2026-03-18T02:22:17","modified_gmt":"2026-03-18T07:22:17","slug":"a-consortium-of-bacteria-cooperates-to-eat-phthalate-plasticizers-that-single-microbes-cant-stomach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/a-consortium-of-bacteria-cooperates-to-eat-phthalate-plasticizers-that-single-microbes-cant-stomach","title":{"rendered":"A \u2018consortium\u2019 of bacteria cooperates to eat phthalate plasticizers that single microbes can\u2019t stomach"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/a-consortium-of-bacteria-cooperates-to-eat-phthalate-plasticizers-that-single-microbes-cant-stomach.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Plastic trash has reached the world\u2019s most remote locations, from the bottom of the Mariana Trench to the summit of Everest. Hundreds of plastic-eating microbes that could help us clean up have been discovered over the past quarter of a century, but there is a long way to go before they can be put to work in natural environments: Microbial digestion of plastic is still slow, requires high temperatures, and only proceeds efficiently in bioreactors. Moreover, most plastic-eating microbes discovered so far can only digest a single kind of plastic.<\/p>\n<p>One solution would be to combine different microbes to tackle plastic pollution as a team. This allows them to share tasks, compensate for each other\u2019s weaknesses, and continue working even when environmental conditions change.<\/p>\n<p>Now, scientists in Germany have discovered such a synergistic \u201cconsortium\u201d of plastic-eating bacteria, which can eat phthalate esters (PAEs)\u2014plasticizers that are often found in building materials, food packages, and personal care products, but have been implicated in hormonal, metabolic, and developmental disorders and some cancers. The results are <a href=\"https:\/\/www.frontiersin.org\/journals\/microbiology\/articles\/10.3389\/fmicb.2025.1757196\/abstract\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in Frontiers in Microbiology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Plastic trash has reached the world\u2019s most remote locations, from the bottom of the Mariana Trench to the summit of Everest. Hundreds of plastic-eating microbes that could help us clean up have been discovered over the past quarter of a century, but there is a long way to go before they can be put to [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1635],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-233543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-materials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233543\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}