+44 330 818 7254Devang Bharatkumar Khambholja1,2 and Kiran Kalia
Coastal environments worldwide are threatened by the consequences of pollution, a risk particularly high in semienclosed basins just like the Mediterranean that's poorly studied from bioremediation potential perspective especially within the Southern coast. Here, we investigated the physical, chemical, and microbiological features of hydrocarbon and heavy metals contaminated sediments collected at El-Max bay (Egypt). Molecular and statistical approaches assessing the structure of the sediment-dwelling bacterial communities showed correlations between the composition of bacterial assemblages and therefore the associated environmental parameters. Fifty strains were isolated on mineral media supplemented by 1% petroleum and identified as a various range of hydrocarbon-degrading bacteria involved in several successional stages of biodegradation. We screened the gathering for biotechnological potential studying biosurfactant production, biofilm formation, and therefore the capability to utilize different hydrocarbons. Some strains were ready to grow on multiple hydrocarbons as unique carbon source and presented biosurfactant-like activities and/or capacity to make biofilm and owned genes involved in several detoxification/degradation processes. El-Max sediments represent a promising reservoir of novel bacterial strains adapted to high hydrocarbon contamination loads. The potential of the strains for exploitation for in place intervention to combat pollution in coastal areas is discussed.The Mediterranean is exposed to a high risk of pollution by petroleum hydrocarbons (HC), thanks to the presence of tens of web sites associated with their extraction, refinery, and transport along its coastline [1]. This risk is exacerbated by several factors, including the semienclosed nature of this sea and therefore the geographical location of most of the oil-producing and oil-consuming countries, placed, respectively, on the Southern and Northern sides of the basin, entailing the presence of pipeline terminal and oiler traffic. A recent analysis of the papers published within the last years about the microbiology of coastal and open-sea sites within the Mediterranean clearly showed that the Southern side of the basin has been largely neglected [2] although it hosts several polluted areas along its coasts, like El-Max district area (Alexandria, Egypt). thanks to the various industrial activities, the disposal of untreated waste effluents, and therefore the shipping activities, El-Max bay may be a coastal site chronically contaminated by petroleum and heavy metals [3] whose clean-up represents a challenge for the Egyptian country and for the whole research community. petroleum may be a mixture of organic compounds which will contain up to 20000 chemicals and it's hardly removable from polluted ecosystems by traditional methods [4]. Bioremediation is an alternate to physical and chemical methods and takes advantage of the aptitude of certain microbes to degrade HC, buffering the effect of oil pollution in natural ecosystems. Bioremediation are often achieved by adding nutrients to the autochthonous biodegrading microbes (biostimulation) or adding a microorganism’s inoculum within the polluted environment (bioaugmentation). The successfulness
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