Project
Towards development of novel tools for plastic degradation pathway discovery from meta-omics data
The project is part of a consortium 'PlasticDaphnia' which aims to explore the response of the invertebrate water flea Daphnia and its microbiome to microplastics (MP) pollution and to develop it as an innovative test system for identifying risk and biodegradability of existing and new MP polymers in surface water ecosystems. The filter feeder Daphnia possess diverse microbiome known to harbour biodegradation capabilities. Furthermore, it has been shown that Daphnia concentrates toxic particles and MPs in freshwater ecosystems thus, the occurrence of unique gene functions that relate to (bio)plastic polymer and monomer degradation is likely. The aim of my project is to explore meta-omics data of Daphnia microbiome in order to develop and apply novel analysis pipeline able to report and quantify the abundance of such functions. Furthermore, the developed tool will be used to map MP biodegradation pathways and its variants present in Daphnia microbiome in a species-specific manner. Ultimately, the output of the project will support the development of Plastic Daphnia as an innovative and bespoke test system that will enable a better assessment of safety and biodegradability of MP polymers.