It remains unknown whether and to what extent marine prokaryotic communities are capable of degrading plastic in the ocean. To address this knowledge gap, we combined enrichment experiments employing low‐density polyethylene (LDPE) as the sole carbon source with a comparison of bacterial communities on plastic debris in the Pacific, the North Atlantic and the northern Adriatic Sea. A total of 35 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) were enriched in the LDPE‐laboratory incubations after 1 year, of which 20 were present with relative abundances > 0.5% in at least one plastic sample collected from the environment. From these, OTUs classified as Cognatiyoonia, Psychrobacter, Roseovarius and Roseobacter were found in the communities of plastics collected at all oceanic sites. Additionally, OTUs classified as Roseobacter, Pseudophaeobacter, Phaeobacter, Marinovum and Cognatiyoonia, also enriched in the LDPE‐laboratory incubations, were enriched on LDPE communities compared to the ones associated to glass and polypropylene in in‐situ incubations in the northern Adriatic Sea after 1 month of incubation. Some of these enriched OTUs were also related to known alkane and hydrocarbon degraders. Collectively, these results demonstrate that there are prokaryotes capable of surviving with LDPE as the sole carbon source living on plastics in relatively high abundances in different water masses of the global ocean.

中文翻译：

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低密度聚乙烯衍生化合物的假定降解物是海洋环境中与塑料相关的细菌群落的普遍成员。

海洋原核生物是否能够降解海洋中的塑料以及在何种程度上降解塑料仍然是未知的。为了解决这一知识鸿沟，我们将采用低密度聚乙烯（LDPE）作为唯一碳源的富集实验与对太平洋，北大西洋和北亚得里亚海的塑料碎片上细菌群落的比较进行了结合。在LDPE实验室培养1年后，总共富集了35种操作分类单位（OTU），其中至少有1种从环境中收集到的塑料样品中存在20种相对丰度> 0.5％。从这些中，OTU被分类为白兰地，Psychrobacter，Roseovarius和Roseobacter在所有海洋站点收集的塑料群落中都发现了这种物质。此外，相比于玻璃和聚丙烯在亚得里亚海北部1年后就地孵化的相关物种，分类为Roseobacter，Pseudophaeobacter，Phaeobacter，Marinovum和Cognatiyoonia的OTU也丰富了LDPE实验室培养的LDPE群落。孵化一个月。这些富集的OTU中的一些还与已知的烷烃和烃降解剂有关。总体而言，这些结果表明，在全球海洋不同水域中，有能力以相对较高的丰度生活在低密度聚乙烯中作为唯一碳源生存的原核生物。