Autochthonous antimicrobial microorganisms: application in wastewater treatment

Abstract

In the previous two decades, people's lifestyles have changed as a result of industrialization, urbanization, and modernity, resulting in a rise in pollutants in daily sewage wastewater output. Less than half of the sewage generated is processed in a sewage treatment facility, while the remaining gets discharged into rivers untreated, deviating physio-chemical parameters of river water from the standards and thus causing harm to aquatic ecosystems. Sewage water contains autochthonous bacteria such as Pseudomonas fluorescens, Bacillus sp., Acinetobacter sp. and Rhodococcus sp that are effective in decontaminating wastewater. They employ a variety of mechanisms to consume pollutants, including biosorption, bioaccumulation and enzyme-mediated bioremediation, and thus can be used in bioremediation schemes. Bacteria possessing antimicrobial activity as well as protease production can be isolated from the wastewater and employed in the sewage treatment plant. The bacterial consortium has also been shown to be successful in wastewater treatment due to the synergistic degradation capabilities of the co- cultivated bacterial strains, which enhance the uptake rate of pollutants as nutrients. Environmental factors such as temperature, pH, oxygen, and nutrition availability at the site all affect the process outcome. The major focus of this review is to emphasize the bacterial capacity to clean wastewater as a single bacterial culture or as part of a bacterial consortium and the factor affecting the degradation process to achieve the requirement of a safer environment.