Ahmed Nawaz
The Open University, UK
Title: Effect of plastics on marine bacterial community composition
Biography
Biography: Ahmed Nawaz
Abstract
Plastic debris is ubiquitous in global oceans with its rising production and the underlying impacts of this man-made litter require urgent attention. To learn about the unaccounted consequences of the plastic debris in the ocean, it is crucial to understand how it influences the microbial communities in marine environment that play key roles in ecosystem functioning. Research has shown that microbes readily colonise marine plastic debris and community members of these microbiotas are speculated to have toxic, pathogenic or plastic degradingspecies. However, the role of plastic in selecting for unique microbial communities is largely unknown, as is the influence of colonising microorganisms on the fate of plastic waste. The current study focuses on determining the influence of plastic type on structure and diversity of seawater bacterial communities. Next generation sequencing and community fingerprinting permitted us to characterise communities from natural seawater. Communities were compared with respect to plastics and physico-chemical properties of the marine environment to determine the factors influencing the bacterial communities. Ahmed Nawaz is currently a PhD candidate at the The Open U