Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2020 Dec 14;10(1):21860.
doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-78821-1.

Biodegradation of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, phenol and sodium sulfate by Nocardia species isolated and characterized from Iranian ecosystems

Davood Azadi  1 , Hasan Shojaei  2
Affiliations

Biodegradation of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, phenol and sodium sulfate by Nocardia species isolated and characterized from Iranian ecosystems

Davood Azadi et al. Sci Rep. .

Abstract

Anthropogenic pollutants are known to have adverse effect on ecosystem, biodiversity and human health. Bioremediation is an option that has been widely used to remediate organic contaminants and reduce the risk of these hazardous materials. Microorganisms are readily available to screen and can be rapidly characterized to be applied in many extreme environmental conditions. Actinomycetes have a great potential for the production of bioactive secondary metabolites which have biodegradation activity. This study aimed to screen and characterize Nocardia species with biodegradation potential from diverse Iranian ecosystems. The isolates were screened from 90 collected environmental samples, identified and characterized using conventional and molecular microbiological methods including the PCR amplification and sequencing analysis of 16S rRNA and rpoB genetic markers. Growth rate in presence of pollutants, chromatography, Gibbs and turbidometric methods were used to determine bioremediation ability. A total of 19 Nocardia isolates were recovered from the cultured samples (21.1%) that belonged to 10 various species. The most prevalent Nocardia species was N. farcinica; 4 isolates (21%), followed by N. cyriacigeorgica and N. cashijiensis like; 3 isolates each (15.7%) and N. asteroides and N. kroppenstedtii; 2 isolates each (10.5%). Our results showed that various Nocardia species have great potential for bioremediation purposes, although they have not received much attention of the scholars for such significant usage.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Geographic distribution of sampling sites from Iranian ecosystems. The Figure source is obtained from Google maps and designed by Adobe Photoshop 2017 v18.1.1.252.
Figure 2
Figure 2
16S rRNA sequence based phylogenetic tree for Iranian biodegrading Nocardia isolates and nearest validated species of Nocardia depicted by applying MEGA8 software using the neighbor-joining method with bootstrapping values 1000. The figures at each node represent bootstrapping values. The tree was rooted with G. terrae.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Growth curves of Iranian Nocardia isolates over a 24 h. Incubation period at 30 °C in the presence of PAHs. C control sample.
Figure 4
Figure 4
HPLC chromatograms of PAHs mix solution by selected Nocardia isolates, (A) control samples, (B) after 144 h incubation at 30 °C. 1. Naphthalene 2. Acenaphthylene 3. Acenaphthene 4. Fluorene, 5. Phenanthrene, 6. Anthracene, 7. Fluoranthene 8. Pyrene 9. Benzo[a] Anthracene 10. Chrysene 11. Benzo[b]fluoranthene 12. Benzo[k]fluoranthene 13. Benzo[a]pyrene 14. Indeno [1, 2, 3-cd] pyrene 15. Dibenzo [a, h] anthracene.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Growth curves of Iranian Nocardia isolates over a 24 h. Incubation period at 30 °C in the presence of phenol. C control samples.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Growth curves of Iranian Nocardia isolates over a 24 h. Incubation period at 30 °C in the presence of sodium sulfate. C control samples.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Kumar A, Bisht B, Joshi V, Dhewa T. Review on bioremediation of polluted environment: A management tool. Int. J. Environ. Sci. 2011;1:1079.
    1. KENSA, V. M. Bioremediation—an overview. I Control Pollution2011 (2015).
    1. de Lorenzo V, Loza-Tavera H. Microbial bioremediation of chemical pollutants: How bacteria cope with multi-stress environmental scenarios. Bacter. Stress Resps. 2010;2:481–492.
    1. Storz, G. & Hengge-Aronis, R. Bacter stress resps. Vol. 791 (Wiley Online Library, 2011).
    1. Zorádová S, Dudášová H, Lukáčová L, Dercová K, Čertík M. The effect of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) on the membrane lipids of Pseudomonas stutzeri. Intern. Biodeter. Biodegrad. 2011;65:1019–1023. doi: 10.1016/j.ibiod.2011.03.012. - DOI

Publication types