MICROBIAL SURFACTANTS IN ENVIRONMENTAL TECHNOLOGIES

Abstract

Surfactants are widely used in different fields of industry that is why the demand for their synthetic analogues is continually in-creases. At the same time the modern deve-lopment of biotechnology and growing atten-tion to environment defense are the source of interest to microbial surfactants as an alternative way of chemical analogues. Due to environmental safety, the ability to emul-sify hydrophobic compounds and increase the efficiency of microbial decomposition of xenobiotic, surfactants are promising for use in environmental technologies.Over the past decades, the environment has got a huge amount of industrial waste, agricultural chemicals and products of their partial transformations that are unique or rare in nature. This resulted in a negative impact on all levels of organization of living matter and that balance breaks the balance that was created over millions of years, so that there is a real threat to the sustainable functioning of ecosystems.Today oil is the main source of energy worldwide, while the probability of getting it into the environment, leading to negative consequences [1]. Since 1992 the world has held more than 20 oil spills [http:/www.endgame.org/oilspills.htm], which led to economic losses and violations of ecological balance. To eliminate the consequences of such accidents physical and mechanical methods are usually used, but they are not always effective enough. According to the Office of Technology Assessment (Office of Technology Assessment, USA) after large-scale disaster, it is possible to remove only 10–15% of oil by mechanical methods [1].To eliminate oil spill there are some promising biological methods, based on direct introduction of petrooxidizing microorganisms (bioaugmentation) or using various substances that stimulate the natural (autochthonous) microbiota (biostimulation) such as microbial surfactants [2, 3]. For the first time the possibility of using microorganisms for the biodegradation of oil in marine sediments was described by Jones et al. 1983 [4]. In the future, scientists expanded the knowledge of oil destructors and conditions of their application [5–8].Recently, interest in microbial surfactants is increasing [9–14], due to significant progress