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Fungal microbiota of biodamages of various polymeric materials
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Researchers catalogued the dominant fungal genera colonizing synthetic polymers — including materials used in aerospace — and demonstrated that Aspergillus fumigatus, Penicillium chrysogenum, and related species degrade polyethylene and PET, then assembled optimized fungal test kits with fewer strains that outperform older standard kits for evaluating polymer biostability.
Data on microbial fouling of various synthetic polymer materials, including those used in space technology, are summarized. It has been established that the dominant groups of microbiota of polymer fouling are the genera of mitosporous fungi Aspergillus, Penicillium, Alternaria, Trichoderma. The enzymatic properties of fungal strains from the collection of microbial cultures of the Microbial Depository Center of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia were studied. It has been shown that Aspergillus fumigatus, Penicillium chrysogenum, P. steckii, Juxtiphoma eupyrena and a number of other fungi have biofouling activity towards polyethylene, polyethylene terephthalate and some other synthetic polymers. New fungal kits have been developed and proposed to evaluate the fungal resistance of polymeric materials. They include fungi isolated from bio-damaged polymers used in space technology and contain 2 to 5 fungal strains instead of 7 to 9 strains in previously used kits. Taking into account the obtained data, a comparative assessment of the fungal resistance of samples of synthetic polymeric materials of various classes that passed accelerated climatic tests has been carried out. It has been established that the kits of biodegradant fungi, composed of cultures of bio-damaged space technology, generally exceeded the activity of the previously used kits, based on which one can judge the obvious advantages of strains isolated from bio-damaged space technology. In the future, these kits could find application not only for biodegradation of polymers, but also for testing the biostability of various polymers, to use for the construction of aviation and space techniques. Moreover, new optimized kits may be developed based on the strains involved in this study.
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