The potential of autochthonous microbial culture encapsulation in a confined environment for phenol biodegradation

Abstract

Olive mill wastewater (OMWW) is claimed to be one of the most polluting effluents produced by agro-food industries, providing high contaminants load that encase cytotoxic agents such as phenolic and polyphenolic compounds. Therefore, a significant and continuous stress episode is induced once the mixed liquor of the wastewater treatment plants (WWTP's) is being exposed to OMWW. The use of bio-augmentation treatment procedures can be useful to eliminate or reduce such stress episodes. In this study, we have estimated the use of autochthonous biomass implementation within small bioreactor platform (SBP) particles as a bio-augmentation method to challenge against WWTPs stress episodes. Our results showed that SBP particles significantly reduced the presence of various phenolics: tannic, gallic and caffeic acid in a synthetic medium and in crude OMWW matrix. Moreover, the SBP particles succeeded to biodegrade a very high concentration of phenol blend (3000 mg L(-1)). Our findings indicated that the presence of the SBP microfiltration membrane has reduced the phenol biodegradation rate by 50 % compared to the same suspended culture. Despite the observed reduction in biodegradation rate, encapsulation in a confined environment can offer significant values such as overcoming the grazing forcers and dilution, thus achieving a long-term sufficient biomass. The potential for reducing stress episodes caused by cytotoxic agents through bio-augmentation treatment procedure using the SBP technology is discussed.

Strategic Design of Synthetic Consortium with Embedded Wastewater Treatment Potential: Deciphering the Competence of Isolates from Diverse Microbiome

“…Mixed cultures have an apparent advantages as the microbial consortia can communally perform the treatment efficiently which cannot be performed individually. Researchers started developing consortia for increasing the efficiency of wastewater treatment (Venkata Mohan et al, 2009), removal of contaminants like phenol (Azaizeh et al, 2015), nitrogen removal (Chen et al, 2015), to treat tobacco wastewater (Wang et al, 2009) etc. Treatment of different wastewaters differs as it dependent of the different contaminants they contain.…”

LP-UV-Nano MgO2 Pretreated Catalysis Followed by Small Bioreactor Platform Capsules Treatment for Superior Kinetic Degradation Performance of 17α-Ethynylestradiol

“…Bacterial cultures were encapsulated in SBP capsules. The encapsulation procedure and experimental validation are detailed in patent PCT/IL2010/00256 [18], Menashe and Kurzbaum [9], and Azaizeh et al [10]. Briefly, the bacterial cultures were encapsulated in cellulose-acetate microfiltration membrane capsules (2.5 cm long and 0.8 cm in diameter).…”

“…Azaizeh et al [10] demonstrated the efficiency of an autochthonous bacterial consortium from olive mill wastewater in phenol biodegradation, while Kurzbaum et al [11] demonstrated phenol biodegradation using SBP-encapsulated Pseudomonas putida F1. The phenol-biodegradation rate of the suspended form and the SBP-encapsulated form were similar, demonstrating the potential of the SBP technology.…”

Extracellular laccase production and phenolic degradation by an olive mill wastewater isolate

“…Three replicates were performed for each gallic acid concentration and control. The samples were centrifuged and the supernatant was sampled at different time points for gallic acid measurement according to the Folin-Ciocalteau reagent (Sigma, Israel) method with gallic acid as the standard (10-100 mg/L) (Azaizeh et al, 2015). The degradation kinetics of gallic acid were calculated in terms of % reduction.…”