BIOREMEDIATION OF CRUDE OIL BY NATIVE MICROBES

Oil spills are detrimental to any environment, both in the spills themselves and the efforts to clean them up. In a world powered by oil, oil exploitation, drilling, and refining are widespread processes that take place all over the globe. These processes often inadvertently contaminate the environments around them. This issue is especially prevalent in oil-driven states like Oklahoma. To solve this serious issue, people are using many methods like chemical, physical, and thermal processes to clean oil spills. While these methods can be useful, they can often be expensive and harmful to the environment. Due to this, there has been a significant push to identify a more environmentally friendly and cheaper way to clean up oil-contaminated areas.

Bioremediation is a natural way to break down environmental pollutants by using living organisms. It is commonly known that microorganisms, like fungi and bacteria, can be used to clean oil-contaminated areas. Compared to bacteria, fungi often have higher biomass, and thus can be more effective in breaking down hydrocarbons. While there are many fungi that can degrade oil, we hope to find an Oklahoma fungus that will safely thrive in its native climate and habitat. By utilizing the fungi’s enzymatic hydrocarbon degrading abilities, we anticipate it to be used to bioremediate oil-contaminated areas.

We have isolated a few new strains of fungi (phylogenetic analysis is ongoing) from a Guthrie drill site. When placing these fungi into MSM media with 1% crude oil as the only carbon source, these fungi can utilize crude oil to support their growth, as a result, degrading crude oil. We are currently placing the candidate fungi into an aqueous MSM solution with 1% crude oil for 1, 7, 14, and 21 days to determine how much and how fast crude oil can be degraded. We are using a flame ionization detector-gas chromatography (FID- GC) to identify which components our fungi can degrade from the crude oil. We are then using an Ultraviolet-visible (UV-Vis) spectrophotometer to determine the total concentration of dissolved hydrocarbons. By utilizing these approaches, we will identify an Oklahoma-indigenous fungus that can quickly and effectively degrade crude oil. This fungus should have great potential to be used as an inexpensive, effective, natural way to remediate oil spills throughout Oklahoma.