Soil and surface water contamination by used lubricating oil is a common occurrence in most developing countries. This has been shown to have harmful effects on the environment and human beings at large. Bioremediation can be an alternative green technology for remediation of such hydrocarbon-contaminated soil. Bioremediation of soil contaminated with 5% and 15% (w/w) used lubricating oil and a...

Mazut as a source content of various hydrocarbons is hard to be degraded and its cracking could turn mazut into useful materials. Nevertheless degradation of mazut by routine methods is too expensive but application of indigenous microorganisms as biocatalysts could be effective and important to lower the costs and expand its consumption. Mazut biodegradation can be improved using various strat...

Models can be powerful tools to aid interpretation of data and for prediction of the fate of contaminants, as in the case of petroleum hydrocarbons in groundwater environments. Here we describe the transport processes that can be more or less dominant at different stages in the ‘life’ of a petroleum contaminant spill in groundwater, such as advection, dispersion, dissolution from free-phase non...

Bioremediation, the exploitation of biological catalysts (mostly microorganisms) for removing pollutants from the environment, requires the integration of huge amounts of data from different sources. We have developed MetaRouter, a system for maintaining heterogeneous information related to bioremediation in a framework that allows its query, administration and mining (application of methods fo...

The goals of our project were to document the diversity and distributions of cultivable fungi associated with decaying Miscanthus and sugarcane plants in nature and to further assess biodegradation of host plant cell walls by these fungi in pure cultures. Late in 2008 and early in 2009 we collected decaying Miscanthus and Saccharum from 8 sites in Illinois and 11 sites in Louisiana, respectivel...

Introduction: Chlorpyrifos is an organophosphorus pesticide that is commonly used in agriculture. This toxin is harmful to a wide range of organisms, including living organisms, useful arthropods, fish, birds, humans, animals, and plants. There are many physical, chemical, and biological methods for the removal of organophosphorus pesticides from ecosystems, among which biodegradation is prefer...

Biosynthesis of nanoparticles has gained great attention in making the process cost-effective and eco-friendly, but there are limited reports which describe the interdependency of physical parameters for tailoring the dimension and geometry of nanoparticles during biological synthesis. In the present study, gold nanoparticles (GNPs) of various shapes and sizes were obtained by modulating differ...

biodegradation of phenol is a major focus of toxic organic compound degradation by microorganisms isolated from polluted areas. an increasing number of bacteria and fungi possessing unique biodegradation capabilities have been isolated in recent years. in this study a new isolate, rhodococcus erythropolis sko-1, from polluted soils in the tehran oil refinery region, is reported. identificati...

Degradability of organic compounds in air, soil, and water is the most important factor for evaluating their environment fate as well as possible adverse effects to humans and the environment. The primary degradation process in the troposphere is the reaction with the hydroxyl radical. For water and soil compartments, the primary degradation process is biodegradation. The objectives of this rep...