Degradation by micro-organisms of polymers and model compounds containing ester, amide or urethane groups: kinetic and mechanistics aspects

This work has been performed using two pure strains of gram positive bacter ia isolated from an industrial compost for household refuse and garden soil . These microorganisms have a stable phenotype, are easy to grow and were s hown to be efficient degraders of various organic structures. It has been p ossible to gel an insight both into fundamental mechanistic aspects of the degradation and into the fate of the studied derivatives in composts. Among others, measurement of oxygen consumption as a function of incubation time together with isolation and identification of degradation intermediates an d residues has shown that short diester-amides derived from phenylalanine a re assimilated without prior hydrolysis. Also the mineralization of typical polyesteramides are limited by the assimilation of the fragments resulting from the ester groups hydrolysis.