Researcher(s)
- Annika Warang, Chemical Engineering, University of Delaware
Faculty Mentor(s)
- Mark Blenner, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Delaware
- Kevin Solomon, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Delaware
Abstract
Polyethylene (PE) waste is the most abundant form of plastic pollution worldwide and poses significant risks to many ecosystems. PE has a carbon backbone that naturally resists biological recycling, a necessary process to preserve its value and usefulness throughout the recycling workflow, unlike traditional mechanical and chemical recycling methods. This project aims to explore and characterize the yellow mealworm gut, a system already known to biologically degrade the molecular weight distribution of PE by up to 31 percent. Antibacterial and antifungal perturbations of the mealworm gut eliminated this deconstruction. While bacterial taxa related to degradation have been explored, there remains a major gap in the understanding of fungal taxa. This study identifies fungi from the mealworm gut by perturbing the gut with varying antimicrobials, dissecting the gut, extracting genomic DNA, and using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and sequencing. In order to isolate some fungal taxa, specific agar media were used to support the variety of needs of fungal species. Sanger sequencing of these isolates resulted in six different strains of Hyphopichia burtonii, supporting previous data that H. burtonii was the most abundant fungal species in the gut. The H. burtonii strains were further characterized in terms of morphology and interactions with PE using qualitative observations and Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR). Strains of varying morphologies were found to have differing behavior with polyethylene, such as forming a biofilm versus internalizing the plastic. Future work on this project will focus on expanding the library of fungal isolates cultured from the mealworm gut by broadening growth conditions, such as media and temperature. The project will also delve deeper into the differences between the strains of H. burtonii to determine if they are caused by genetic sequences or environmental stressors in the culturing protocol.