It is estimated that at least 600,000 metric tons of crude oil seep into the environment each year, and most human methods of decontamination are incomplete and costly (Das & Chandran, 2011). Microbial communities, made up of many species of interacting bacteria, provide a simple and effective solution to cleaning up oil, as natural communities mediate the degradation of most of the oil hydrocarbons in the environment (Kostka et al., 2011). Bioremediation, the use of microbes to clean up contamination, relies on the structure of the microbial communities present (Liu et al., 2017). Understanding the structure and the assembly of these communities is of crucial importance to humans as we continue to scour the planet for oil with less reliable and more dangerous technologies, and place ourselves at risk of huge spills like the Deepwater Horizon Spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 (Kostka et al., 2011). In this experiment, previously enriched soil microbial communities were manipulated to study their growth in oil-containing environments. Selected samples were transferred to a mineral salts media that contained 0.1% and 0.01% canola oil to mimic an oil habitat. The cultures were supplemented with fresh media every 7 days for 10 weeks. Samples were then diluted and plated on 0.1% R2A agar. Unique colonies were selected based on morphology and size and then streaked for isolation. After one week of growth, these colonies were transferred to 0.1% and 0.01% oil supplemented R2A plates. The colonies were then sequenced to determine species classification. Most dominant species were successfully isolated including these species: Chryseobacterium, Pseudomonas, Stenotrophomonas, Variovorax and Acidovorax. These results suggest that soil bacteria can be potential candidates for bioremediation in oil environments. Manipulation of these species in synthetic oil environments could lead to further conclusions on their effectiveness in degrading oil.
Author: Chloe Moncayo
Faculty Advisor: Annette Bollmann Department of Microbiology
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