Evaluating the diesel biodegradation potential of wild microfungi isolat-ed from decaying wood in Nigeria

Abstract

We evaluated the potentials of pure wild microfungi isolated from decaying wood in utilizing diesel as source of carbon/energy and monitoring of their physiological responses via OD and pH gradient fluxes. The fungi diversity was obtained by conventional enrichment culture methods. Pure cultures of tentative fungal species namely: SC1, SC2, SC3, YI and Y2 were tested for their ability to utilize diesel oil as carbon and energy source. From the cultural, morphological and biochemical characterization and comparison with respect to the standard reference of fungi, the wild microfungi tentatively named as SC1, SC2, SC3, YI and Y2 were seemingly the members of Penicil-lum, Aspergillus, Mucor, Candida and Cryptococcus species. The diesel de-pendent growth of the pure microfungi was assessed by monitoring the flux-es in the pH and Optical density OD of the minimal media slurry for 288 hours. There were fluctuations in OD as well as pH values for the different microfungi. The mean pH data 5.90 ± 0.01-7.01± 0.01 and the OD 0.349± 0.001 -1.232 ± 0.002 were obtained. The ability of our fungal isolates to tol-erate diesel and grow in it, suggests that the isolates can be employed as bioremediation agent.