Isolation and characterization of heavy-metal-resistant bacteria and their applications in environmental bioremediation

Heavy metal pollution is one of the emerging problems of environmental contaminations due to the rapid industrialization of geologic and anthropogenic activities. Among further metals, chromium originates to be noxious due to its connotation with other metals. Therefore, the present investigation aims to isolate, identify and characterize the bacteria from soil samples and to evaluate their heavy metal (chromium) degrading efficiency under batch mode condition. Among the 300 bacterial isolates, two strains such as Pseudomonas fluorescens (YPS3 GenBank number—MH580200) and Bacillus safensis (YKS2 GenBank number—H539636) have found to possess effective chromium degrading capacity up to 84% and 72%, respectively, which was identified by morphological, biochemical and molecular characterization. The 16S rRNA phylogenetic association was resolute by means of bioinformatics and recognized as bacterial species YKS2 and YPS3 with 100% sequence resemblance. In conclusion, the findings show effective chromium degradation level by the bacterial strains in the contaminated environment soil. These biological mediated metal degradation methods will be an effective green alternative for polluted environment.