Findings can aid fight against plastic pollution

QINGDAO — A collaborative team of scientists from China, the United Kingdom and Denmark has constructed a comprehensive global marine microbiome database, demonstrating the potential of marine microorganisms for marine science research and biotechnological and biomedical applications.

The research team, led by BGI-Research in Qingdao, Shandong province, also discovered new enzymes that can break down plastics and peptides that can aid efforts to fight antibiotic resistance.

The team spent five years reanalyzing nearly 240 terabytes of publicly available marine metagenomic data and built a database containing 43,191 metagenome-assembled genomes and 2.46 billion gene sequences. More than 20,000 of these genomes were identified as potential novel species.