Abstract
Water samples were collected from three oil polluted stations, two replicates for each station, from southern region of Shatt Al-Arab estuary, and southern of Basrah city during the period from September to October 2011. The mineral salts medium was used to isolating oil biodegrading bacteria. Four bacterial species were identified according to their morphological and biochemical profiles as: Aeromonas hydrophila , Bacillus subtilis , Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Pseudomonas fluorescens . The percentage of biodegrading ability of B. subtilis and the mixture of these bacteria to n-alkanes and isoprenoids (pristine, phytane) were measured and compared with control. Crude oil is used as a sole source of energy and the incubation period was 24 days, the hydrocarbons loss are detected each 6 day interval using capillary gas chromatography. Bacterial species were exposed to biological mutation by using Maillard reactions to improve the n-alkanes and isoprenoids (pristine, phytane) biodegradability. For this, a mixture of glucose-lysine in a concentration of 4 M was used to mutate B. subtilis and A. hydrophila while for P. aeruginosa and P. fluorescens a mixture of glucose-arginine in a concentration of 9 M. Biodegradability percentage was increased for B. subtilis from 60.6 to 92.5% and ranged from 37 to 72.3% for the other species. Also the bacterial mixture biodegradability for oil increased from 78 to 87.5%. Keywords: Oil biodegradation, Aeromonas hydrophila , Bacillus subtilis , Pseudomonas aeruginosa , Pseudomonas fluorescens , n-alkanes, Maillard reactions African Journal of Biotechnology , Vol 13(11), 1243-1249
Highlights
The hydrocarbons and petroleum constitute one of the main environmental pollutants
The effective mixture of Maillard reaction products (MRPs) is at the concentration 4 M which lead to induced a random mutation in B. subtilis and A. hydrophila while the effective mixture to P. aeruginosa and P. fluorescens was at the concentration 9 M
The results show that the bacteria degrading in the beginning, the lower and higher hydrocarbon chains while the middle chains were degraded later and these results are in accordance with
Summary
The hydrocarbons and petroleum constitute one of the main environmental pollutants. The petroleum contains thousands of individual hydrocarbons and related compounds. Their main components are saturated (nand branched-chain alkanes and cycloparaffins rings), aromatic and polynuclear compounds (PAHs) and resins and asphaltenes (Rosa et al, 2006). Bioremediation of the environment polluted by crude oil relies on the fact that indigenous microbial population can biodegrade most of the hydrocarbons present in oils, mineralizing them into carbon dioxide and water (Fritsche and Hofrichter, 2008). It is uncommon to find organisms that could effectively degrade both aliphatic and aromatics possibly due to differences in metabolic routes and pathways for the degradation of the two classes of hydrocarbons (Fritsche and Hofrichter, 2008). Some reports have suggested the possibility of bacterial species with propensities fordegradation of both aliphatic and aromatic hydrocarbons simultaneously (Salam et al, 2011)
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