Polystyrene Upcycling into Fungal Natural Products and a Biocontrol Agent

Polystyrene (PS) is one of the most used yet infrequently recycled plastics. Although manufactured on the scale of 300 million tons per year globally, current approaches toward PS degradation are energy- and carbon-inefficient, slow, and/or limited in the value that they reclaim. We recently reported a scalable process to degrade post-consumer polyethylene-containing waste streams into carboxylic diacids. Engineered fungal strains then upgrade these diacids biosynthetically to synthesize pharmacologically active secondary metabolites. Herein, we apply a similar reaction to rapidly convert PS to benzoic acid in high yield. Engineered strains of the filamentous fungus Aspergillus nidulans then biosynthetically upgrade PS-derived crude benzoic acid to the structurally diverse secondary metabolites ergothioneine, pleuromutilin, and mutilin. Further, we expand the catalog of plastic-derived products to include spores of the industrially relevant biocontrol agent Aspergillus flavus Af36 from crude PS-derived benzoic acid.