Item | Description | Importance | Best practice examples |
---|---|---|---|
Plastic identity | Descriptive name for the polymer, molecular weight and source. | Study reproducibility. | |
Plastic composition | Complete polymer composition, plus composition and quantity of all additives and fillers. | To differentiate the degradation of polymer and additives. | |
Microbial taxonomic classification | Taxonomic classification from well-characterised marker genes such as full 16S rRNA gene sequences for bacteria. | Reproducibility and the extrapolation of findings to related species. Benefits studies into the phylogenetic distribution of plastic-degrading traits. | |
Isolation environment and conditions | Strain isolation location and site-specific properties such as temperature and pH. | Identification of environments favourable for microbial plastic degradation. | Novotný, et al. [170] |
Strain accessibility | Deposition and description of isolated strains in international culture banks. | Permits greater reproducibility and further study by other researchers. | Yoshida, et al. [161] |
Assessment of plastic degradation | Description of techniques used for confirmation of degradation, and preferably the use of multiple complementary methods (Fig. 4). | Confirmation of degradation. It is important to confirm how techniques differentiate between the degradation of the polymer and additives, where included. | |
Plastic-degrading enzyme and gene identification | Identification of the enzyme responsible for the biological degradation and its gene sequence. | Allows mining of molecular databases, recombinant gene expression, enzyme optimisation, etc. |