Degradation of synthetic oligomers by microorganisms. I. Microbial degradation of styrene oligomer.

Of 72 soil samples, 10 samples have shown to possess one or more organisms capable of degrading styrene oligomer to some extent.In the course of investigation, dimers are found to disappear rapidly from the culture medium.Trimers, however, are degraded a little and oligomers higher than tetramer not at all.One of the isolates, Alcaligenes sp.559, grows well on styrene oligomer and is selected for further study.This bacterial strain utilizes unsaturated dimer (1,3-diphenyl-l-butene) as sole source of carbon and degrades cyclic dimer (1-methyl-3-phenylindane) together.No degradation of trimers by the strain was detected.Furthermore, the assimilation of various aromatic hydrocarbons by this strain was examined and insusceptibility of the oligomers higher than trimer was discussed according to the results.