The DOI matches its Crossref record; 9 of the 9 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Ubiquity of polystyrene digestion and biodegradation within yellow mealworms, larvae of Tenebrio molitor Linnaeus (Coleoptera: Tenebrionidae)
Open accessAbstract
Academics researchers and "citizen scientists" from 22 countries confirmed that yellow mealworms, the larvae of Tenebrio molitor Linnaeus, can survive by eating polystyrene (PS) foam. More detailed assessments of this capability for mealworms were carried out by12 sources: five from the USA, six from China, and one from Northern Ireland. All of these mealworms digested PS foam. PS mass decreased and depolymerization was observed, with appearance of lower molecular weight residuals and functional groups indicative of oxidative transformations in extracts from the frass (insect excrement). An addition of gentamycin (30 mg g-1), a bactericidal antibiotic, inhibited depolymerization, implicating the gut microbiome in the biodegradation process. Microbial community analyses demonstrated significant taxonomic shifts for mealworms fed diets of PS plus bran and PS alone. The results indicate that mealworms from diverse locations eat and metabolize PS and support the hypothesis that this capacity is independent of the geographic origin of the mealworms, and is likely ubiquitous to members of this species.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
DADA2: High–resolution sample inference from Illumina amplicon data
Callahan, B. J., McMurdie, P. J., Rosen, M. J., Han, A. W., Johnson, A. J. A., & Holmes, S. P. (2016) · Nature Methods · doi:10.1038/nmeth.3869 · Cited by 35,698
Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made
Geyer, R., Jambeck, J. R., & Law, K. L. (2017) · Science Advances · doi:10.1126/sciadv.1700782 · Cited by 18,606
ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis
Wickham, H. (2009) · doi:10.1007/978-0-387-98141-3 · Cited by 14,447
Greengenes, a Chimera-Checked 16S rRNA Gene Database and Workbench Compatible with ARB
DeSantis, T. Z., Hugenholtz, P., Larsen, N., Rojas, M., Brodie, E. L., Keller, K., Huber, T., Dalevi, D., Hu, P., & Andersen, G. L. (2006) · Applied and Environmental Microbiology · doi:10.1128/aem.03006-05 · Cited by 10,891
Hidalgo-Ruz, V., Gutow, L., Thompson, R. C., & Thiel, M. (2012) · Environmental Science & Technology · doi:10.1021/es2031505 · Cited by 5,440
Moving pictures of the human microbiome
Caporaso, J. G., Lauber, C. L., Costello, E. K., Berg-Lyons, D., Gonzalez, A., Stombaugh, J., Knights, D., Gajer, P., Ravel, J., Fierer, N., et al. (2011) · Genome Biology · doi:10.1186/gb-2011-12-5-r50 · Cited by 1,138
Otake, Y., Kobayashi, T., Asabe, H., Murakami, N., & Ono, K. (1995) · Journal of Applied Polymer Science · doi:10.1002/app.1995.070561309 · Cited by 307
Guillet, J. E., Regulski, T. W., & McAneney, T. B. (1974) · Environmental Science & Technology · doi:10.1021/es60095a011 · Cited by 79
Microbial degradation of [14C]polystyrene and 1,3-diphenylbutane
Sielicki, M., Focht, D. D., & Martin, J. P. (1978) · Canadian Journal of Microbiology · doi:10.1139/m78-134 · Cited by 60
Cited by
Microbial and Enzymatic Degradation of Synthetic Plastics
Mohanan, N., Montazer, Z., Sharma, P. K., & Levin, D. B. (2020) · Frontiers in Microbiology · doi:10.3389/fmicb.2020.580709 · Cited by 1,122
Microbial Degradation and Valorization of Plastic Wastes
Ru, J., Huo, Y., & Yang, Y. (2020) · Frontiers in Microbiology · doi:10.3389/fmicb.2020.00442 · Cited by 609
Peng, B.-Y., Su, Y., Chen, Z., Chen, J., Zhou, X., Benbow, M. E., Criddle, C. S., Wu, W.-M., & Zhang, Y. (2019) · Environmental Science & Technology · doi:10.1021/acs.est.8b06963 · Cited by 389
Self-citationJing, T.-Z., Qi, F.-H., & Wang, Z.-Y. (2020) · Microbiome · doi:10.1186/s40168-020-00823-y · Cited by 341
Self-citationKim, H. R., Lee, H. M., Yu, H. C., Jeon, E., Lee, S., Li, J., & Kim, D.-H. (2020) · Environmental Science & Technology · doi:10.1021/acs.est.0c01495 · Cited by 334
Metadata
- Authors
- Yang, S.-S., Wu, W.-M., Brandon, A. M., Fan, H.-Q., Receveur, J. P., Li, Y., Wang, Z.-Y., Fan, R., McClellan, R. L., Gao, S.-H., Ning, D., Phillips, D. H., Peng, B.-Y., Wang, H., Cai, S.-Y., Li, P., Cai, W.-W., Ding, L.-Y., Yang, J., Zheng, M., Ren, J., Zhang, Y.-L., Gao, J., Xing, D., Ren, N.-Q., Waymouth, R. M., Zhou, J., Tao, H.-C., Picard, C. J., Benbow, M. E., & Criddle, C. S.
- Venue
- Chemosphere
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2018-12
- Volume
- 212
- Pages
- 262-271
- ISSN
- 0045-6535 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2887240255
- Cited by
- 224
- References
- 9
- FWCI
- 5.79
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Ubiquity of polystyrene digestion and biodegradation within yellow mealworms, larvae of Tenebrio molitor Linnaeus (Coleoptera: Tenebrionidae). https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1016/j.chemosphere.2018.08.078
- The paper
- Yang, S.-S., Wu, W.-M., Brandon, A. M., Fan, H.-Q., Receveur, J. P., Li, Y., Wang, Z.-Y., Fan, R., McClellan, R. L., Gao, S.-H., Ning, D., Phillips, D. H., Peng, B.-Y., Wang, H., Cai, S.-Y., Li, P., Cai, W.-W., Ding, L.-Y., Yang, J., . . . Criddle, C. S. (2018). Ubiquity of polystyrene digestion and biodegradation within yellow mealworms, larvae of Tenebrio molitor Linnaeus (Coleoptera: Tenebrionidae). Chemosphere. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chemosphere.2018.08.078
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.