Degradation of plastics by Microbes

The first part deals with the use of photooxidation, thermal oxidation and plasma treatment to enhance surface properties of polyethylene for bio-adhesion. The second one is discussing on the need to isolate novel bacterial strain to degrade the polyethylene and making the polyethylene more susceptible to microbes by adding pro-oxidant additives and to study the efficiency of the bacterial isolates for biodegradability of polyethylene in pure culture using shake flask method. Two bacterial strains were isolated and using biochemical and molecular characterization (16s rRNA) they were identified as (a) Bacillus cereus strain Ma-Su CECRI-1 (Bac) and deposited in the GenBank database under Accession No. GQ 501070 & (b) Lysinibacillus fusiformis strain Ma-Su CECRI-2 (Lys) and deposited in the GenBank database under Accession No. GQ 501071. These bacteria were further used in in-vitro shake flask biodegradation studies.