African Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 6 (11), pp. 1338-1342, 4 June 2007   

ISSN 1684–5315 © 2007 Academic Journals        

Full Length Research Paper

Studies on degradation of chlorinated aromatic hydrocarbon by using immobilized cell crude extract of Pseudomonas aeruginosa

R. Manikandan*, H. J. Prabhu and P. Sivashanmugam

Department of Chemical Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli-620015, India.

*Corresponding Author's E-mail: clz0314@nitt.edu  or rmanikandan1968@yahoo.com.

Accepted 14 May, 2007

In this work Pseudomonas aeruginosa (NCIM-2074) has been identified as potential organism to decompose chlorobenzene by its crude extract through immobilization technique. P. aeruginosa was grown on chlorobenzene as sole source of carbon and energy. Chlorobenzene was used as an inducer to develop specific intracellular enzymes which will decompose chlorobenzene to non-toxic substances. Crude cell extracts produced which contains intracellular enzyme, were immobilized on sodium alginate beads. The beads were mixed with different concentration (100, 200, 300 ppm) of chlorobenzene to study the kinetics of degradation of chlorobenzene. The rate of decomposition of chlorobenzene by immobilized crude extracts was measured at different time intervals and it was found that 93 to 95 percentage of chlorobenzene can be decomposed with in 10 min. The immobilized crude extracts were reused for all other experiments and found that immobilization technique can be used for higher capacity conversion for the scale up process.

Key words: Chlorobenzene, decomposition, cell crude extract, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, immobilization.