plasticOME

The gut microbiome (GM) is essential to human health and its dynamics allow for compositional and functional changes, giving it the potential to help hosts to adapt to rapidly changing environments. Although there is growing concern and public pressure to understand the impacts of increased plastic pollution on human health, a detailed assessment of this xenobiotic’s impacts on GMs is a major gap in research that this proposal seeks to bridge. I hypothesize that given (a) human exposure to plastics began very late in human evolution at the turn of the 20th century, (b) this exposure is ever increasing, and (c) preliminary results from my previous research show associations between plastic ingestion and changes in GM diversity and compositions, then plastics likely play a role in shaping GMs and their functions in modern humans. I aim to test this hypothesis by (1) determining the prevalence of plastic-degrading (PD) microbes and functions across modern GMs in order to (2) validate and characterize in vitro a subset of candidate gut microbes’ capacity for previously unidentified PD to finally (3) investigate plastics as a modulator of modern GMs. This will unveil unexplored factors behind the evolution of human gut microbiomes that could lead to the discovery of new plastic degrading microbes relevant for plastic pollution remediation strategies. This project takes an unconventional and multidisciplinary approach by exploiting advances in microbiome research encompassing bioinformatic tools and databases, applying these to the plastics field, and targeting humans. By building on my existing skills in wildlife and microbial ecology and plastics research and expanding them into human and computational metagenomics (strengths of the host), I am confident that plasticOME will enhance my academic profile at the unique crossroad between metagenomics and plastics research, allowing me to grow into an independent group leader.