Characterization of crude oil-degrading bacteria in a crude oil-contaminated and uncontaminated site in Kuwait

Abstract

The planning of cities must insure a balance between human consumption and natural resources that should be preserved and if needed should be used minimally and efficiently following plans of sustainability. The current study investigated the possibility of recycling natural waste product "plants leaves" that usually fall off, are collected, dumped and burnt. In counties like Kuwait where crude oil constitutes a major pollutant and the environment is hostile for microbial activity rendering bioremediation to be a trivial option. Thus, in the present study, the leaves of Conocarpus and Tamarix were used to enrich the low organic content soils that showed the potential of soil supplementation with organic matter to enhance the growth and activity of soil indigenous microbiota. The amendments of soils with 20 mg g -1 soil significantly increased the counts of crude oil-degrading bacteria in crude oil-contaminated and uncontaminated soils to 999.4 x 10 -3 CFU g -1 and 358.8 x 10 -3 CFU g -1 soil, respectively. The identification of isolated bacteria revealed the dominance of the genus Microbacterium (39.6%), Sphingopyxis soli (19.3%), and Bordetella petrii (19.6%) in unamended, Conocarpus-amended and Tamarix-amended contaminated soils, respectively. The 16S rRNA analyses showed the high diversity of isolated bacteria. Also, the diversity of the majority of isolated bacteria decreased after soil amendments with plant-derived material. Therefore, the recycling of plant-derived materials could be an excellent option under conditions tested and confirm the commandments of sustainable planning.

Microbial community successional patterns in beach sands impacted by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill

“…Members of the Hyphomonas genus have been reported as abundant members in consortia degrading aromatic compounds, which are typically more recalcitrant components of the crude oil than alkanes and hence, more prevalent in later post-spill stages (Maeda et al, 2009(Maeda et al, , 2010. Similarly, Sphingopyxis is known to have aromatic hydrocarbon degradation capabilities (Kertesz and Kawasaki, 2010) and was previously detected as a dominant group in soil-derived oil-degrading consortia amended with natural organic matter (Hassan et al, 2011).…”