Abstract
Plastic debris in the ocean form a new ecosystem, termed ‘plastisphere’, which hosts a variety of marine organisms. Recent studies implemented DNA metabarcoding to characterize the taxonomic composition of the plastisphere in different areas of the world. In this study, we used a modified metabarcoding approach which was based on longer barcode sequences for the characterization of the plastisphere biota. We compared the microbiome of polyethylene food bags after 1 month at sea to the free-living biome in two proximal but environmentally different locations on the Mediterranean coast of Israel. We targeted the full 1.5 kb-long 16S rRNA gene for bacteria and 0.4–0.8 kb-long regions within the 18S rRNA, ITS, tufA and COI loci for eukaryotes. The taxonomic barcodes were sequenced using Oxford Nanopore Technology with multiplexing on a single MinION flow cell. We identified between 1249 and 2141 species in each of the plastic samples, of which 61 species (34 bacteria and 27 eukaryotes) were categorized as plastic-specific, including species that belong to known hydrocarbon-degrading genera. In addition to a large prokaryotes repertoire, our results, supported by scanning electron microscopy, depict a surprisingly high biodiversity of eukaryotes within the plastisphere with a dominant presence of diatoms as well as other protists, algae and fungi.
Highlights
Plastic pollution has become an integral part of our environment
The bags were secured to a stable structure with a fishing line sewed into a firm polycarbonate strip that was inserted in one edge of each of the bags allowing limited movement but preventing tearing and detachment
The parameters were similar in all runs, with only a slight decrease in the percent identity of the consensus sequence to the database sequence toward 10 reads coverage which was still sufficient for the correct identification of the species
Summary
Plastic pollution has become an integral part of our environment. Circulating since the 1950s, plastic traces are present almost everywhere on e arth[1]. The development boost in next-generation sequencing (NGS) platforms in recent years, significantly reduced the time and costs of sequencing, transforming the environmental metabarcoding and biodiversity research[8] Following pioneer studies, such as those of De-Tender et al.[9] and Zettler et al.[6], researchers have begun using NGS-based metabarcoding as the major tool to depict the plastisphere taxa composition on marine microplastic collected from the ocean and on plastic polymers that were experimentally exposed to the marine environment. Together with the morphological identification of taxa by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), demonstrate the efficiency of this approach in the characterization of life in the plastisphere as well in the identification of plastic-associated species
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