Isolation and Characterization of Hydrocarbon-Degrading Bacteria from Wastewaters in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

Lubricants are very often found in nature under waste-oil forms and represent for the environment a real danger of pollution due to the difficulty of their biodegradation. The situation is especially worrying in most developing countries in particular those of Sub-Saharan Africa due to the absence of regulation or control. The present work aims to isolate bacterial strains able to degrade hydrocarbons which can later be used in biotechnology for environments depollution. Oil-contaminated wastewater samples were collected in Ouagadougou city (Burkina Faso) and then used as source of bacterial isolation. Appropriate amounts of samples were inoculated to a mineral salt medium (MS) with Total Quartz 9000 oil as sole carbon and energy source and then incubated for enrichment, prior to microbe isolation. Two bacterial strains namely S2 and S7 were isolated from the enrichment cultures. The strains were tested for their ability to degrade other hydrocarbons (i.e. gasoline, diesel oil, brake oil) and for temperature, pH and salt concentration ranges for growth before their biochemical characteristics were defined. Based on their morphological, physiological and biochemical traits, strains S2 and S7 belong to Acinetobacter and Pseudomonas genera, respectively.