Abstract
Aniline, a serious environmental threat and health risk to living organisms is being released into the soil and water bodies owing to its expanded use in industry. The objective of the present study was to isolate a strain from rhizospheric soil samples of wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) taken from an agricultural site near the industrial area of Faisalabad, with the capability of degrading aniline with its maximum activity. The isolated strain was identified as Staphylococcus aureus ST1 a newly reported strain for aniline degradation. The strain ST1 showed tolerance up to 2000 ppm for aniline on mineral salt media plates and its degradative ability was checked through shake flasks experiments using HPLC. The strain was capable of degrading aniline and utilizing it as a sole source of carbon and energy. Maximum reduction of aniline concentration in medium up to 59.65% was observed after 72 h. An enhancement in biodegradation was observed using glucose as an additional growth substrate. The degradative products analyzed by HPLC were catechol, phenol and some other unknown compounds. Plasmid curing showed the involvement of plasmid encoded genes which was later followed by the isolation of plasmid DNA, which was found to be a large one of ~40 kb having restriction sites for enzymes (EcoRI, BamHI, ClaI,StuI, PstI, and HindIII) used. Key words: Aniline, biodegradation, Staphylococcus aureus, HPLC, plasmid curing, restriction sites.
Highlights
Rapid industrialization and improper discharge of industrial effluents, wastes, accidental spills or deliberate release of certain hazardous chemicals that are mutagenic, carcinogenic and recalcitrant, pose a serious threat to environment including soils, groundwater as well as open water bodies (Tani et al, 1998)
The effect of different concentrations of aniline with and without glucose was studied on seven bacterial strains (ST1, ST2, ST3, ST4, ST5, ST6 and ST7) and it was found that these all were capable of growing on aniline (100 ppm)
Time (Afte r 72 Hours) glucose, it was observed that of these all only two strains (ST1, ST2) gave rich growth in the 2 to 3 days of incubation (Table 1). These two strains (ST1 and ST2) when restreaked on PNR media containing higher concentrations of aniline with and without glucose for adaptation, strain ST1 showed good and maximum tolerance at all concentrations of aniline while ST2 showed its maximum tolerance at 1000 ppm (Table 2) and as such, strain ST1 was selected for further experiments
Summary
Rapid industrialization and improper discharge of industrial effluents, wastes, accidental spills or deliberate release of certain hazardous chemicals that are mutagenic, carcinogenic and recalcitrant, pose a serious threat to environment including soils, groundwater as well as open water bodies (Tani et al, 1998). These effluents have a variety of unusual chemicals including a range of aromatic hydrocarbons and their derivatives (Van der Meer et al, 1992) which the microbes enzymatically decompose and utilize in cellular metabolism (Phale et al, 2007).
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