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Bacterial Biofilms Colonizing Plastics In Estuarine Waters, With An Emphasis On Vibrio Spp. And Their Antibacterial Resistance, Amanda L. Laverty, Sebastian Primke, Claudia Lorenz, Gunnar Gerdtz, Fred Dobbs

OES Faculty Publications

Since plastics degrade very slowly, they remain in the environment on much longer timescales than most natural organic substrates and provide a novel habitat for colonization by bacterial communities. The spectrum of relationships between plastics and bacteria, however, is little understood. The first objective of this study was to examine plastics as substrates for communities of Bacteria in estuarine surface waters. We used next-generation sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene to characterize communities from plastics collected in the field, and over the course of two colonization experiments, from biofilms that developed on plastic (low-density polyethylene, high-density polyethylene, polypropylene, polycarbonate, polystyrene) …