Assessing Interactions of Organic Compounds during Biodegradation of Complex Waste Mixtures by Naturally Occurring Bacterial Assemblages

摘要

Selected organic chemicals were tested to determine the minimum concentrations at which complete inhibition of microbial degradative processes occurred. Complete inhibition did not occur at less than 2 g/L phenol, 10 g/L toluene or n-butanol, and 100 g/L acetone, benzene or methanol. Consequently, microbial degradative processes may play a significant role in the abatement of even very high organic pollutant concentrations. Glucose utilization and thymidine uptake rates were tested as indicative of the toxic effects of organic pollutants. Both methods accurately indicated the concentrations of organic pollutants required to cause cessation of degradative activities and could serve as indicators of degradative inhibition, in lieu of degradation studies, when analytical processes for test organics are expensive or unavailable. Degradation kinetics of the high organic chemical concentrations followed typical multiphasic kinetic patterns, which tended to yield pseudo-first-order degradation rates over a wide range of chemical concentrations, except when chemical concentrations were sufficiently high to elicit metabolic inhibition. (Copyright (c) 1989 SETAC.)