Hemamalini Varadarajan¹, Sneha Shikha^1,

There has been a tremendous increase in the number and types of various industries, with all industrial operations generating wastes in one form or the other. Electroplating sector contributes a major part in deteriorating the local environment at a massive scale due to the persistent accumulation of heavy metals in the environment. Nature of the microbial biodiversity of industrial effluents, in particular, the effluent from the electroplating industry remains largely uncharacterized. In this study, a unique set of chemo-heterotrophic organisms comprising of nine bacteria and eleven fungi were isolated from the effluents of a gold electroplating industry effluent, located in Mumbai, India. The culture isolates were identified by biochemical tests and partial 16S rRNA and 18S rRNA gene sequence matches. Among the cultures isolated and identified, four were novel and hitherto unreported species of bacteria and ten were new strains of fungi. The sequence data of novel isolates obtained were submitted at NCBI, GenBank to acquire unique accession numbers subsequent to which new strain designations were given to them by the authors. The bacterial isolates were designated as Staphylococcus sp. ss-1, Achromobacter sp. ss-2, Macrococcus sp. ss-4 and Bacillus sp. ss-6. New strain designations were assigned to the fungal isolates as Talaromyces marneffei strain GEF-1, Penicillium pinophilum strain GEF-2, Curvularia lunata strain GEF-3, Aspergillus tamarii strain GEF-4, Aspergillus tamarii strain GEF-5, Aspergillus sydowii strain GEF-6, Aspergillus flavus strain GEF-7, Aspergillus niger strain GEF-8, Aspergillus awamori strain GEF-9 and Cladosporium sphaerospermum strain GEF-11. The study highlights the presence of new isolates endowed with metal resistance genes possibly for multiple heavy metal resistance to be able to survive in several heavy metal polluted environment. Indigenous microorganisms isolated from the electroplating effluents may be studied to examine their potential to produce enzymes, and bioactive compounds for application in agricultural, pharmaceutical, industrial, environmental and medical sciences.

Microbial Biodiversity, gold electroplating industry, electroplating effluent, novel species, heavy metal pollution, heavy metal resistance