Highly read on pubs.acs.org/journal/esthag in August

A new ecosystem is emerging on plastic marine debris in the world's oceans: the 'plastisphere'.

Tracy Mincer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Linda Amaral-Zettler of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, both in Massachusetts, and their colleague sequenced the microbial communities on plastic litter floating in the sea. They revealed a complex food web living in biofilms on two types of plastic, made up of microbes that were genetically distinct from those in the surrounding seawater. Unlike those in seawater samples, the communities on plastic had an even spread of diversity and were not dominated by just one or two types.

Environ. Sci. Technol. http://doi.org/m4q (2013)