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 bacteria isolated from an industrial compost for household refuse and garden soil. These microorganisms have a stable phenotype, are easy to grow and were shown to be efficient degraders of various organic structures. It has been possible 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 and residues has shown that short diester-amides derived from phenylalanine are assimilated without prior hydrolysis. Also the mineralization of typical polyesteramides are limited by the assimilation of the fragments resulting from the ester groups hydrolysis.