What kind of microbes eat oil

Including oil biodegradation in our ADIOS software will provide oil spill responders with an even better tool to help them make decisions about their options during a response. As part of the team working on this project, it has provided me with a much greater appreciation for the important role that oil-eating bacteria play in the long-term effort to keep our oceans free of oil.

Timmis, and P. Emtiazi, and S. Prince, R. Perkins, and M. Jones, and W. These Ocean Microbes Do. There are at least seven species of ocean bacteria that can survive by eating oil and nothing else. However, usually only a small number of oil-eating bacteria live in any given part of the ocean, and it takes a few days for their population to increase to take advantage of their abundant new food source during an oil spill. Probably not. In the months after DWH, the government released an estimate of what happened to the oil.

About half of the oil was removed from the Gulf by standard physical and chemical methods. The ultimate fate of the other half? Unknown at the time. The spill and formation of the GoMRI coincided with the arrival of genomic and bioinformatic tools like metagenomic sequencing. Because these advances removed the necessity and difficulty of culturing individual microbes, scientists were able to study the DWH spill in unprecedented detail.

Many new microbial species, genes, metabolic pathways and community dynamics were discovered as outlined in the joint colloquium report, none of which would have been possible without this important three-way partnership that brought together two societies of international AAM and AGU renown and the important, time relevant investment by GOMRI.

Samantha Joye, who co-led the colloquium, and is a distinguished professor in the Department of Marine Sciences at the University of Georgia. Although hydrocarbon-degrading microbes seem exotic, they are found around the world in low abundance, even when crude oil is not present.

In fact, GoMRI researchers discovered that many well-known types of microbes ex: Bacteroidetes have the potential to degrade hydrocarbons. During an oil spill, these low-abundance microbes sense hydrocarbons and move toward the source. There they flourish and reproduce. The bloom consumes hydrocarbons, sometimes transforming them into byproducts that are harder to break down. After depleting available nutrients, the bloom species die off and other organisms that degrade these byproducts dominate.

The microbial ecosystem in the Gulf of Mexico may have been primed for oil bioremediation before DWH because of persistent oil seepage in the waters from drilling.

These dispersants can cause environmental problems themselves. The DNA sequencing revealed evidence that some bacteria can degrade sulfur-containing compounds such as those found in dispersants used after the Deepwater Horizon spill.

Understanding how bacteria are genetically programmed to eat oil provides scientists with clues for how to create better dispersants and ocean cleanup strategies. Copy link. Explore Latest Articles.