Identification and classification of marine bacteria associated with poly(ethylene terephthalate) degradation

Poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) is a manmade synthetic polymer that has been widely used in a variety of industries. The high production and usage of PET, together with the inappropriate handling of PET wastes are becoming a global environmental issue, especially in the marine environment. Detailed taxonomic investigations of marine bacteria that have the potential to degrade PET were the focus of this thesis. Taxonomic studies based on comparative phylogenetic and genomic analyses, traditional physiological and biochemical studies, together with newly developed modern taxonomic tools, namely multi-locus sequence analysis and MALDI-TOF MS revealed three novel bacterial species, Alteromonas australica H17T, Marinobacter similis A3d10T and Marinobacter salarius R9SW1T, in which M. similis A3d10T has shown to have the ability to degrade the PET trimer in this study.