Abstract
An organism isolated from soil grew well on isoprene oligomers and degraded 60 percent of a sample of synthetic cis-l, 4-polyisoprene (Mn=940) in 4 days. The organism hardly degraded synthetic polyisoprene with higher average molecular weight of 2, 500. From gel permeation chromatography, oligomers with molecular weight as high as 1, 000 were shown to be attacked. The residual substrate after degradation was shown by infrared spectro-scopy to have a relatively higher amount of 3, 4-structure than the original. From these re-sults, it was supposed that 3, 4-linkages in synthetic polymers prevent biodegradation of higher
