Browsing by Subject "bioremediation"

Soil contamination with oily products poses great healthy and environmental risks to the polluted sites. The remediation difficulty mainly comes from the complexity of hydrocarbons. Different kinds of remediation technologies have been applied for hydrocarbon removal from soil. New technologies especially in situ bioremediation technologies are emerging constantly. Soil assessment is a key step in the remediation processes since it provides information about the contamination level and potential risks. In the present study, hydrocarbon contaminated soil samples were collected from two sites (one site was contaminated by weathered oily sludge waste with some vegetated plots; the other was contaminated with fuel oil with short-chain hydrocarbons). The samples were analyzed for physicochemical properties and hydrocarbon degraders were enumerated. Four degrading strains were isolated from the samples and their 16S rRNA genes were sequenced. The samples and isolates were investigated to check the existence of three catabolic genes involved in petroleum degradation. The objective was to reveal the intrinsic bioremediation potential of contaminated soils by investigating the key remediation “players” i.e. the degrader microorganisms and catabolic genes. The coexistence of abundant degraders and diverse catabolic genes give the soil a good potential for bioremediation. In addition, the relationships between degrader counts, genes detection and soil contamination levels can reveal how the contaminants affect the indigenous microbial community. The differences between vegetated and nonvegetated plots can also suggest if vegetation with legumes has good potential for hydrocarbon bioremediation. According to the results, both sites were moderately contaminated with different hydrocarbon composition. In the landfarming site, the TPH depletion in vegetated fields was higher than the unvegetated bulk soil areas. However, the degrading microorganism counts had no significant differences between vegetated and nonvegetated plots. The hydrocarbon contamination level had no correlation with the degrader counts. In subsurface soils where aeration was quite limited, degrading microorganisms were much lower than those in surface soils. Catabolic genes were detected from the isolated strains but rarely from the contaminated soil samples. The contaminants co-extracted with soil DNA may inhibit the PCR-based gene detection. With more primer sets or primers targeting broader genetic diversity ranges, more detection results can be expected.