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Bioaugmentation of soil contaminated with high-level crude oil through inoculation with mixed cultures including Acremonium sp.

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Abstract

Heavy contamination of soil with crude oil has caused significant negative environmental impacts and presents substantial hazards to human health. To explore a highly efficient bioaugmentation strategy for these contaminations, experiments were conducted over 180 days in soil heavily contaminated with crude oil (50,000 mg kg−1), with four treatments comprised of Bacillus subtilis inoculation with no further inoculation (I), or reinoculation after 100 days with either B. subtilis (II), Acremonium sp.(III), or a mixture of both organisms (IV). The removal values of total petroleum hydrocarbons were 60.1 ± 2.0, 60.05 ± 3.0, 71.3 ± 5.2 and 74.2 ± 2.7 % for treatment (I–IV), respectively. Treatments (III–IV) significantly enhanced the soil bioremediation compared with treatments (I–II) (p < 0.05). Furthermore, significantly (p < 0.05) greater rates of degradation for petroleum hydrocarbon fractions were observed in treatments (III–IV) compared to treatments (I–II), and this was especially the case with the degradative rates for polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and crude oil heavy fractions. Dehydrogenase activity in treatment (III–IV) containing Acremonium sp. showed a constant increase until the end of experiments. Therefore reinoculation with pure fungus or fungal-bacterial consortium should be considered as an effective strategy in bioaugmentation for soil heavily contaminated with crude oil.

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Acknowledgments

The project was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China (No. GK201402022).

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Medicinal Resources and Natural Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Ministry of Education, National Engineering Laboratory for Resource Developing of Endangered Chinese Crude Drugs in Northwest of China, College of Life Sciences, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an, 710062, Shaanxi, China

    Xiao-Kui Ma & Ning Ding

  2. Department of Chemical Engineering, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada

    Eric Charles Peterson

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  1. Xiao-Kui Ma
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  2. Ning Ding
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  3. Eric Charles Peterson
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Correspondence to Xiao-Kui Ma.

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Ma, XK., Ding, N. & Peterson, E.C. Bioaugmentation of soil contaminated with high-level crude oil through inoculation with mixed cultures including Acremonium sp.. Biodegradation 26, 259–269 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10532-015-9732-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10532-015-9732-7

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