Mycoremediation of Hydrocarbon and its products using Fusarium oxysporum

Oil spillage is one of the major causes of environmental pollution which diversely affects the ecosystem. Mycoremediation plays a significant role in degrading or removing substances like hydrocarbons, polychlorinated compounds, heavy metals and others toxicants from the affected environment using fungi. The aim was to isolate the fungi from the contaminated soil and evaluate its degradative potential. The contaminated soil sample was collected from an automobile shop in Padi, Chennai. The fungi were grown in Bushnell Haas Agar medium and isolation of pure colonies was done. Two fungi species were grown. Hydrocarbon degradation assay was performed with the isolated fungi and the hydrocarbon chosen for degradation was naphthalene. The growth profiles were monitored and the absorbance was measured up to 9 days. One of the isolated fungi STRAIN-2 (C1-P) efficiently degraded 1% naphthalene and was confirmed by methylene blue assay. The molecular characterization of STRAIN-2 (C1-P) was done to generate DNA barcode for identifying the organism. The organism was identified as Fusarium oxysporum using morphological observations and genomic DNA sequencing. The identified fungi achieved 98% similarity with accession number KR0470601 from NCBI.