Water and the Environment: Microbes Are the First Line of Defense in the BP Oil Spill

As an estimated 12,000-19,000 barrels of oil gush into the Gulf Coast from the largest oil spill disaster in U.S. history, much attention on the environmental impact has been focused on fish, birds, and other larger aquatic species.  However, minimal attention to the microbial community that serves as the first line of defense in this environmental catastrophe has been examined.

Microbes are the engines that drive the energy flow and nutrient cycling in the environment. In the aquatic system, they play a vital role in ensuring sustainable water quality for all aquatic life.  They do so through a rapid bacterial-mediated process that requires special bacterial enzymes that are uniquely equipped to degrade hazardous compounds into simple forms that ultimately become usable as nutrient and energy sources for the rest of aquatic life in the food chain.

In the absence of bacteria, these hazardous compounds, such as the crude oil, and natural gas, now spewing in the Gulf Coast would otherwise choke the aquatic life by consuming available dissolved oxygen.

As in Hurricane Katrina, microbes played a critical role in degrading and detoxifying most of the chemicals that poured into the Gulf, such as volatile organic compounds and toxic metals that are associated with crude oil.  Similarly, one expects the microbes to play a crucial role in the days ahead, and when the oil gusher is finally sealed through the relief wells.

Our bioremediation research at Spelman may not solve the oil spill, but we will be able to provide enhanced understanding on the roles of microbes in the clean-up efforts, and in the characterization of the chemicals in the crude oil.  Through our current funding from the Department of Energy, and previous funding from the Department of Defense, our laboratory in the Environmental Science and Studies Program, have demonstrated that our patented consortium of bacterial culture has been shown to be effective in degrading volatile organic compounds, such as trichloropropane, and detoxifying toxic metals associated with groundwater pollution. We are also able to optimize the growth of specific bacterial stains for specific degradation of a particular environmental contaminant.

In addition, our laboratory is well equipped to characterize and measure a variety of volatile organic compounds such as those found in crude oil and natural gas. In the coming days, when the political cloud of the oil spill clears, my students and I will be collecting water samples from the Gulf Coast in pursuit of this effort. – Victor Ibeanusi, Ph.D., is chair of the Environmental Science and Studies Program at Spelman College.