ROLE OF YEAST CONSORTIUM FOR THE REMEDIATION OF PERYLENE FROM AQUEOUS ENVIRONMENT: PROCESS OPTIMIZATION

Abstract

Perylene (PRL), a five- ring nuclear polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) has attracted attention because of its toxic properties. This study aimed to evaluate the efficiency of yeast consortium YC02 to remediate PRL in presence of ZnO nanoparticles and produced biosurfactant in the growth medium. Response surface methodology (RSM), 3- level five variables Box-Behnken design (BBD) was employed to optimize the factors viz. pH 7.0, temperature 30ºC, shaking speed 130 rpm, inoculum dosage 3% and zinc oxide nanoparticles (ZnO) concentration 2 g L-1 after a period of 6 days of incubation for the enhanced degradation of PRL (74 ± 0.01%) using yeast consortium. It was well in close agreement with the predicated value obtained by RSM model yield (74 ± 0.8%). Analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed F-value of 58.13, R2 of 0.9790, probability of <0.0001 and coefficient of variation of 1.32 % confirmed the validity of the model. Degradation of PRL was assessed using GC-MS and FTIR analysis. Kinetic study demonstrated that PRL degradation fitted first order kinetic model. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report on process optimization towards nanobioremediation of PRL using yeast consortium in presence of ZnO nanoparticles and produced biosurfactant in medium.