Fig 1.
OTU richness and diversity of the bacterial community of the biofilm of all plastics, glass and water samples after one week, one month and two months of incubation.
Each symbol represents a sample. Duplicate samples from the individual surfaces and seawater were collected except LDPE after one month incubation under dim light conditions, seawater after two months incubation and PVC DINP under dim light conditions after one and two months of incubation. The lines connect the middle value between the duplicates of the different sampling points. In cases where there were no duplicates, the lines connect to the value of the single sample.
Fig 2.
NMDS representation of the similarity between the bacterial community composition of the biofilm on different surfaces and seawater.
Bray-Curtis Dissimilarity was used as the distance measurement. Each point represents one sample. The grey polygons connect groups of samples from each time point exposed to the same light conditions.
Fig 3.
Relative abundances of the bacterial families representing at least 5% of the total bacterial community in at least one sample.
Families representing < 5% of the total bacterial community were grouped into the category “Others”.
Fig 4.
Values of iF representing the discrimination of the most abundant bacterial families (with >5% relative abundance in at least one of the samples) for either one of the plastics or glass after one week under ambient and dim light conditions. Positive values indicate discrimination for a specific plastic type over glass, negative values indicate discrimination for glass over a specific plastic type. Bacterial families are ordered from high (left) to low (right) relative abundance. Total abundance was determined per treatment and time point. The LEfSe analysis identifying discriminating families of either glass or of any of the polymers after one week of incubation can be found in S5 Table.
Fig 5.
Taxa that discriminated for one of the surfaces over all other surfaces considering both light treatments and determined by the discriminant linear analysis (LEfSe) after one week of incubation.
The results of the LEfSe analysis can be found in S8 Table.