Isolation and Genetic Identification of Phenol Degrading Bacterium from Wastewater of Assiut University Hospitals

Phenol and phenolic compounds are the most common pollutants in hospital wastewater. Their carcinogenic and toxic effects have been recorded on human being. Identification of the key microorganisms that play a role in pollutant degradation processes is relevant to the development of optimal in situ bioremediation strategies. In the current study, a bacterium strain designated as AUN-AS01 was isolated from wastewater of Assiut University hospitals by enrichment technique in mineral basal salts (MBS) medium supplemented with phenol as a sole carbon and energy source. The strain AUN-AS01 was identified using PCR amplification of 16S rRNA gene and sequence analysis. The comparison of the alignment results and phylogenetic analysis of the sequences of the isolated strain to published rRNA gene sequences in Gen Bank, confirmed the identification of the isolate as Paenibacillus mucilaginosus AUN-AS01.The strain was able to grow and had a tolerance of phenol concentration up to 1600 mg/L -1 . It was observed that temperature, pH and initial concentration of phenol play key roles in determining the rate of phenol degradation by the isolated strain AUNAS01. Results showed that, the strain was efficient in removing 92.26±0.05% of the initial 800 mg/l phenol within 48 h with optimal conditions, at 30 o C and had a pH of 7.0. Our results demonstrate that, strain Paenibacillus mucilaginosus AUN-AS01could be used to remove the phenol from the environment. These findings may lead to new 14 Ahmed Salah et al. (2020), Egyptian Sugar Journal, Vol.15 ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ biotechnological applications for the degradation of phenol, related to hospitals wastewater.