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Abstract Submission

  • Call for Abstracts - Friday 19th September 2014
  • Deadline for Abstracts - Friday 24th October
  • Abstract Selection - Friday 31st October

Please submit your abstract as a word document via email attachment to mmeg@bangor.ac.uk  by 16:00 on Friday 24th October.

Your abstract must be no more than 200 words and include the names and affiliations of all authors with the speaker as the first author and an email contact for the author.

Speakers will be informed of their selection on Friday 31st October 2014.

Please follow exactly the abstract format given in the example below:

Example Abstract

Biodegradation of tricyclic diamondoid naphthenic acids by microbial consortia

Benjamin D Folwell1, Terry J McGenity1, Andrew Price2, Lisa Brown3 Corinne Whitby1
1School of Biological Sciences, University of Essex, UK.
2Oil Plus Ltd., Newbury, UK.
3Geoenvironmental Engineering, University of Alberta, Canada.
bdfolw@essex.ac.uk

Oil-sand deposits make up more than half of global oil reserves, and during the refining process vast quantities of oil-sands-process-affected waters (OSPW) are generated that contain highly toxic naphthenic acids (NAs). Recently, tricyclic diamondoid NAs were found in OSPW, but there is a lack of information about their in-situ biodegradation. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate microbial consortia isolated from OSPW samples (designated TPW and 2m) that could degrade the diamondoid NAs admantane-1-carboxylic acid (A1CA) and 3-ethyl-adamantane carboxylic acid (3EA). Both the TPW and 2m communities degraded A1CA by approximately 71% and 3EA by approximately 50% in 33 days. The bacterial communities were monitored over the 33 day duration of the experiments by denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis, which showed significant changes in the community (ANOSIM p <0.05) in all cases. The enrichment of Pseudomonas, Microbacterium, Streptomyces and Acidovorax species at day 11, and Exiguobacterium, Bacillus, Thauera and Hydrogenophaga species at day 33, indicated that complex communities are required to degrade both A1CA and 3EA. Together with ongoing work investigating the toxicity of these NAs and their metabolites, these findings should direct strategies to remove NAs from OSPW. 

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