Stenotrophomonas maltophilia isolated from gasoline-contaminated soil is capable of degrading methyl tert-butyl ether

Background: Methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE) is a pollutant that causes deleterious effects on human and environmental health. Certain microbial cultures have shown the ability to degrade MTBE, suggesting that a novel bacterial species capable of degrading MTBE could be recovered. The goal of this study was to isolate, identify and characterize the members of a bacterial consortium capable of degrading MTBE. Results: The IPN-120526 bacterial consortium was obtained through batch enrichment using MTBE as the sole carbon and energy source. The cultivable fraction of the consortium was identified; of the isolates, only Stenotrophomonas maltophilia IPN-TD and Sphingopyxis sp. IPN-TE were capable of degrading MTBE. To the best of our knowledge, this report is the first demonstrating that S. maltophilia and Sphingopyxis sp. are capable of degrading MTBE. The degradation kinetics of MTBE demonstrated that S. maltophilia IPN-TD had a significantly higher overall MTBE degradation efficiency and rate (48.39 ± 3.18% and 1.56 ± 0.12 mg L-1 h-1, respectively) than the IPN-120526 consortium (38.59 ± 2.17% and 1.25 ± 0.087 mg L-1 respectively). The kinetics of MTBE removal by both cultures fit first-order and pseudo-first-order reaction models. Conclusions: These findings suggest that S. maltophilia IPN-TD in axenic culture has considerable potential for the detoxification of MTBE-contaminated water.

Degradation of methomyl by the novel bacterial strain Stenotrophomonas maltophilia M1 / Degradación del metomil por la nueva cepa bacteriana Stenotrophomonas maltophilia M1

The use of microorganisms in the degradation and detoxification of many toxic xenobiotics, especially pesticides, is an efficient tool for the decontamination of polluted sites in the environment. A novel bacterial strain (M1) was isolated from several water samples contaminated with methomyl which is capable of degrading methomyl pesticide (1000 ppm) in the presence of 0.05 percent glucose. These water samples were collected from different irrigation sites in Egypt where methomyl is heavily applied. The partial sequence of 16SrRNA gene of the isolate showed the highest similarity to Stenotrophomonas maltophilia. Restriction fragment patterns of isolated plasmid DNA showed that this strain harbours two different plasmids PMa (8Kb) and PMb (5Kb). PMb succeeded to be transferred to Escherichia coli DH5á strain. This transformed strain (M2) acquired the ability to grow in the presence of methomyl (1000 ppm) and 0.05 percent glucose. So it was deduced that the gene responsible for the degradation process was encoded by this plasmid. The ability of the two strains M1 and M2 to degrade methomyl was detected by using solid phased extraction coupled to capillary liquid chromatography-electrospray ionization-mass spectrometry (SPE-LC-ESI-MS).