Undergraduates taking Yale’s Rainforest Expedition and Laboratory course journey to the Amazon, gather microorganisms, and take them back to New Haven for examination. The students concentrate on gathering organisms called endophytes (an endophyte is “a bacterium or fungus...that lives within a plant for at least part of its life without causing apparent disease”). Endophytes produce various compounds that have had a variety of uses in medicine, biofuel production, and agriculture. What the students found were several endophytes that chemically reacted with, and could biodegrade, polyurethane—some can even do it in the absence of oxygen. The findings, says SciTechDaily, “may lead to innovative ways to reduce waste in the world’s landfills.” The paper describing these findings was published in the July issue of Applied and Environmental Microbiology. The search is also now on for organisms that make have an appetite for more difficult-to-degrade plastics like polystyrene.