Bioremediation, The Path to a Less Polluted Future.

Corals are a large and diverse ecosystem found worldwide within the Earth’s oceans. They are known to play a vital role in not only marine life survival but also in the oceans natural processes and maintenance of functions. With the increase in industrialisation and demands for life’s luxuries, pollution rates have skyrocketed alongside. This has made a great impact to the health and survival of marine life forms, from micro to macro. Corals, and most other marine life are easily harmed by oil spills and anthropogenic pollution within our waters. 

The Current  solutions to relieve environmental damage/contamination is via the use of chemical dispersants, however these can be harmful to corals and other marine life within the contaminated areas. Marine life friendly is still under development. Bioremediation is an introduced microorganism that breakdown or dissipates any contamination within an area without bringing harm to the organisms surrounding it. This is the step forward.

 

This experiment proposed creating a probiotic bacterial symbiont of a coral (Mussismilia harttii) as a form of bioremediation. This bacterium was created, and then tested not only on the breakdown of WSF’s but also against the health of the coral host.

The research was broken into to 2 parts, one being the creation of the probiotic bacteria, the seconds being the tests. The bacterium, once created, was analysed as a bioremediation agent. Through multiple tests on singular corals/oil contaminated water the bacterium was trained to  degrade water soluble oil factions (WSF’s). After a full analysis the bacterium proved to have a dual function, not only did it breakdown the oils it also had a positive effect on the corals, minimising the effects pollution had on coral while boosting the coral health. This was proven via the corals increase in regulation of normal processes. 

With an increase in today’s levels of pollution bioremediation should be considered as a way of helping to reduce contamination within environments as not only does it reduce the pollution, it doesn’t harm to wild life in the processes, with further analysis it could be perfected for each environement. I believe further study should be done for all environments not just marine to help create a less polluted earth in the future.

Original Paper: Impact of oil spills on coral reefs can be reduced by bioremediation using probiotic microbiota                                                                                                                                              Henrique Fragoso dos Santos