ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Mar. Sci.
Sec. Marine Pollution
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmars.2025.1581727
This article is part of the Research TopicFrom Micro to Macro: Interactions of Marine Biota with Plastic PollutionView all articles
Characterization of Microbial Biofilms on Marine Plastics: Community Development and Density Implications for Vertical Transport Dynamics
Provisionally accepted
- 1Old Dominion University, Norfolk, United States
- 2Ecosystems Center, Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woodshole, Massachusetts, United States
- 3Marine Science Institute, College of Natural Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin, Port Aransas, Texas, United States
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Marine plastic pollution poses a significant and escalating threat to ocean ecosystems, with microbial colonization on plastics playing a critical role in determining their environmental fate.Despite the recognized importance of microbial biofilms, their composition, dynamics, and functional contributions on buoyant plastics remain poorly understood. In this study, we leveraged a novel integrative approach by simultaneously employing 16S, 18S, and ITS sequencing alongside microscopy, lipidomics, pigment analysis, adenosine triphosphate and
Keywords: Biofilm, Plastic, Buoyancy, Ballast, ATP, Lipids
Received: 23 Feb 2025; Accepted: 24 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Joern, Pedrosa Pàmies, Jiang, Liu and Bochdansky. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Gregory Michael Joern, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, United States
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