MONITORING THE POPULATION DYNAMICS OF BIODEGRADABLE CONSORTIA DURING BIOREMEDIATION

摘要

The monitoring of bacterial numbers, activities, and population dynamics is an important part of understanding and optimizing any bioremediation process. The continued use of classical microbiological, enzymological, and biochemical techniques for enumeration and measuring microbial activity will an remain important part of monitoring biore-mediations, as it provides excellent, needed quantitative data. However, the added use of molecular biology techniques for the study of the microbial populations as they develop during bioremediation is now providing much enhanced qualitative data. The RAPD and DGGE methods can, for example, give an overview of the microbial community structure under study at different genus and species levels, and they can do so in a relatively short period of time with a high degree of accuracy and sensitivity. Of course, all of the techniques described in this paper have inherent limitations, and one technique should not be relied on solely to monitor microbial numbers, population dynamics, and/or activities. Instead, by using of a mixture of classical microbiology techniques and molecular biology techniques, weaknesses of a given technique will be compensated for, and a much better overall picture of the bioremediation process will be obtained.