Microbial Degradation of Petroleum Hydrocarbon Contaminants: An Overview

By N. Das, Preethy Chandran. Biotechnology Research International, 2010

1,962 citations recorded by the source corpus.

One of the major environmental problems today is hydrocarbon contamination resulting from the activities related to the petrochemical industry. Accidental releases of petroleum products are of particular concern in the environment. Hydrocarbon components have been known to belong to the family of carcinogens and neurotoxic organic pollutants. Currently accepted disposal methods of incineration or burial insecure landfills can become prohibitively expensive when amounts of contaminants are large. Mechanical and chemical methods generally used to remove hydrocarbons from contaminated sites have limited effectiveness and can be expensive. Bioremediation is the promising technology for the treatment of these contaminated sites since it is cost-effective and will lead to complete mineralization. Bioremediation functions basically on biodegradation, which may refer to complete mineralization of organic contaminants into carbon dioxide, water, inorganic compounds, and cell protein or transformation of complex organic contaminants to other simpler organic compounds by biological agents like microorganisms. Many indigenous microorganisms in water and soil are capable of degrading hydrocarbon contaminants. This paper presents an updated overview of petroleum hydrocarbon degradation by microorganisms under different ecosystems.

Subfields: Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ae32275e7130b7777c93b5da1fb1e3285aa01cc3

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Citations in the corpus

Microbial bio transformation: a process for chemical alterations (2017, background): “However, one of the major concerns these days is the hydrocarbon contamination resulting from the activities related to the petrochemical industry [35].”
Microbial degradation of petroleum hydrocarbons. (2017, positive): “There are various reports available on metabolic versatility of mixed cultures that have demonstrated superiority of mixed cultures to pure cultures to utilize hydrocarbon pollutants in petroleum crude as sole carbon source (Cerqueira et al., 2011; Das and Chandran, 2011; Varjani et al., 2013).”
Application of microorganisms in bioremediation-review (2018, background): “Among the physical factors temperature is the most important one to determining the survival of microorganisms and composition of the hydrocarbons [13].”
The role of microorganisms in achieving the sustainable development goals (2018, background): “Microorganisms such as Burkholderia, arthrobacter, Chromobacterium, Micrococcus, Candida, Pseudomonas, and Bacillus can degrade crude oil and hydrocarbons, that too without any arti ﬁ cial enhancement, by the process known as intrinsic remediation (Das et al., 2011; Kumar and Gopal, 2015).”
The Role of Microorganisms in Bioremediation- A Review (2017, background): “Among the physical factors temperature is the most important one to determining the survival of microorganisms and composition of the hydrocarbons [13].”
Trichoderma: a potential bioremediator for environmental clean up (2013, background): “Many filamentous fungi like Amorphoteca, Neosartorya, Talaromyces, Cunninghamella elegans, and Phanerochaete chrysosporium (Das and Chandran 2011) and bacteria (Jin et al. 2011) are known to degrade PAHs.”
Siderophores in environmental research: roles and applications (2014, background): “Microorganisms could play an important role in the remediation of petroleum hydrocarbons from the marine environment (Das and Chandran, 2011).”