![]() This has led to a significative advance in the volume of disposed PPE, including a huge amount of not-reusable rubber latex gloves. The increased demand of PPE, related to the SARS-CoV-2 virus circulation, is currently due to an amplified usage by the medical personnel but also by common people in their everyday life (Nowakowski et al., 2020). These rubber amounts, related to the PPE, are just a portion of those consumed yearly worldwide: in the year 2019, about 14 million tons of NR have been used (Wang et al., 2020). In particular, in the year 2020, the use of PPE has grown exponentially for the protection from the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) infection: 65 billion gloves have been consumed monthly worldwide, of which 0.5 billion only in Italy (Prata et al., 2020). Among all these applications, rubber is greatly used in the medicine field for the production of disposable medical or personal protective equipment (PPE) (Mente et al., 2016). Rubber products belong to assorted application areas, such as the manufacturing, medicine, household, and transport ones. high tensile strength, elasticity, and flexibility) which make it a raw material of great interest (Zhao et al., 2019). The produced quantities reach numerous millions of tons per year: NR has unique properties (i.e. The latex, collected from the tree by tapping the trunk, mainly contains cis-1,4-polyisoprene units, 87% dry weight, while the remaining 13% is represented by proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, and minerals (Bottier, 2020). tree, typical of the tropical Amazonian forests. NR is mainly extracted from the Hevea brasiliensis Müll. ![]() Natural rubber (NR) is used to manufacture products essential for the everyday life consequently, the worldwide demand for rubber grows continuously and it almost entirely gravitates towards the NR production because it is currently unfeasible to synthetically reproduce NR, in particular due to its branched chemical structure (Sriring et al., 2018). Results obtained in the microcosm study provided useful information in terms of soil aeration and nutrient amendment in view of a future biodegradation process scale-up. The positive effect of soil mixing evidenced that the biodegradation process was mainly carried out by aerobic biomass, especially filamentous fungi, as confirmed by microbial counts and SEM observations. Obtained results confirmed that the naturally selected microbial consortium was able to use NR as the only C-source and to biodegrade it. Furthermore, after 236 days, a NR dry weight loss of 15.6%, in BD microcosms, was registered, about four-fold higher than that registered in BC control (3.7%). During the incubation, in biodegradation microcosms (BD), containing NR samples, the produced CO 2 was significantly higher than that of biotic controls (BC). The effect of primary C-source and fresh soil addition, soil aeration, and humidity maintenance has been monitored by means of microbiological and respirometric analysis, dry weight loss determinations, and SEM micrographs. To this purpose, prepared soil microcosms were incubated for 236 days, at room temperature, and natural light/dark cycles. She was a Postdoctoral fellow at the Biodiversity Research Centre at the University of British Columbia in Canada.In the present work, natural rubber (NR) biodegradation, by means of a microbial consortium, naturally selected in a tyre dump soil, has been evaluated. in ecology from the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile in Chile. She holds a bachelor’s degree in biology and a Master in zoology from the Universidad de Concepcion in Chile, and a Ph.D. Her research is being supported by two NSF DEB awards, including a highly prestigious NSF CAREER award, and two awards from the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv). ![]() She was the Chair of the 2022 Gordon Research Conference (GRC) on Unifying Ecology Across Scales. Her work combines theory, observations, experiments, and data synthesis approaches to help predict ecological patterns and processes across space and time. ![]() Drawing from general principles, González aims to develop a more integrated understanding of ecological systems. Much of her research is concerned with the effects of natural and human-induced environmental changes on the diversity, composition and function of communities and ecosystems. ![]() González is a broadly trained ecologist with interests that range from organismal traits to community and ecosystem ecology. González got tenure recently, being the first female professor getting tenure in her department. Angélica González is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biology and the Center for Computational and Integrative Biology at Rutgers University. ![]()
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