Full Length Research Paper

Biotreatment of anthraquinone dye Drimarene Blue K₂RL

Muhammad Faisal Siddiqui¹*, Saadia Andleeb², Naeem Ali², Pir Bux Ghumro² and Safia Ahmed²

¹Department of Biotechnology, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan.

²Department of Microbiology, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan.

*Corresponding author. E-mail: send2biotech@yahoo.com. Tel: +92-3339017644.

Accepted 8 December, 2009

Abstract

Drimarene blue (Db) K2RL is a reactive anthraquinone dye, used extensively in textile industry, due to poor adsorbability to textile fiber; it has a higher exhaustion rate in wastewater. The dye is toxic, carcinogenic, mutagenic and resistant to degradation. Decolorization of this dye was studied in two different systems. Shake flask study, using the same immobilized fungus Aspergillus niger SA1 with increasing concentration (10 - 300 ppm) of dye resulted in 75% decolorization in 24 h with 10 ppm concentration, while the higher the concentration of dye, the lower the values (68% at 25 ppm, 40% at 50 ppm, 11% at 100 ppm, 3% at 200 ppm and 2% at 300 ppm) of decolorization (p < 0.05). Simulated textile effluent containing 10 ppm dye Db K2RL was tested aerobically using sludge in stirred tank reactor (STR) at 30ºC for 8 days. The values achieved of chemical oxygen demand (COD) reduction and decolorization were 84% (r = 0.968) and 30% (r = 0.905), respectively. This study revealed that immobilized fungus A. niger SA1 have potential, while sludge containing bacterial consortium have limited potential to be used as bioremediation for textile dye drimarene blue K2RL.

Key words: Immobilized fungus, drimarene blue K2RL, stirred tank reactor, COD.