Microbial communities on plastic paddles in a wastewater treatment plant in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

This study aims to increase our understanding of plastic impacts the microbial communities present in the final oxidation pond of a wastewater treatment plant in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Plastic paddles were deployed in the final oxidation pond and sampled at 2, 6, 26 and 52 weeks. The prokaryotic, fungal and eukaryotic community compositions were investigated by Illumina MiSeq sequencing of the prokaryotic V4 region of the 16S rRNA gene, the fungal ITS2 region and the eukaryotic 18S rRNA gene.