Browsing by Author "Kumar, Vikram"

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    Recent advances in the omics-based assessment of microbial consortia in the plastisphere environment: Deciphering the dynamic role of hidden players
    (Institution of Chemical Engineers, 2023-06-10T00:00:00) Malik, Naveen; Lakhawat, Sudarshan Singh; Kumar, Vikram; Sharma, Vinay; Bhatti, Jasvinder Singh; Sharma, Pushpender Kumar
    Continuous disposal of plastic waste and its accretion in the environment is the biggest challenge the world has ever faced. Breaking its terrestrial bounds, plastic waste has now extended its outreach to aquatic territories including marine ecosystems. Photooxidation-mediated partial degradation converts plastic polymers to micrometric dimensions, thus augmenting their biomagnification in the food chains. Besides contaminating the food chains, microplastics also act as potential carriers of pollutants and pathogenic microbes. The slow and inefficient biodegradation of plastic by microorganisms in their natural habitats offers an opportunity to explore biotechnological interventions to overcome and mitigate the hazardous effects of plastic waste. Microorganisms utilize plastic polymer as a carbon source thus deriving energy from its oxidation and mineralization. The whole microbial consortium in the plastisphere interacts during the biodegradation process. The emergence of these novel plastic-dwelling microbial communities makes plastic degradation a very complex and finetuned process, where the expression of novel plastic-degrading genes and resultant pathways and interaction networks all contribute towards biodegradation. Thus, it is quite challenging to study such vast consortia of microbial communities by conventional approach to fully understand the degradation pattern of plastics. The techniques like shotgun metagenomics, transcriptomics and meta transcriptomics, next-generation amplicon sequencing, proteomics and metaproteomic, etc. have been successfully employed in recent years for identifying novel microbial species, gene pool, interactions network, and reaction pathways from different microbial consortia. Among several classes of bacteria, the Flavobacteriaceae, Rhodobacteriaceae, and Phycobactereaceae have shown their remarkable presence in different plastisphere. Omics approaches have also revealed high-level expression of plastic-degrading enzymes like esterases, depolymerases, hydrolases, and reductases. The applicability of these techniques in context to the studies of microbiota in the degradation of plastics is defined by their high accuracy, quickness, and sensitivity. The current review accentuates the significance of omics-based studies in identifying specific microbiota, dynamic gene pool, functional pathways, and metabolic networks of the plastisphere microbial consortia. � 2023 The Institution of Chemical Engineers