RESEARCH ARTICLE
Immobilization of Microbes for Bioremediation of Crude Oil Polluted Environments: A Mini Review
Zeynab Bayat1, Mehdi Hassanshahian1, *, Simone Cappello2
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2015Volume: 9
First Page: 48
Last Page: 54
Publisher ID: TOMICROJ-9-48
DOI: 10.2174/1874285801509010048
Article History:
Received Date: 01/12/2014Revision Received Date: 13/04/2015
Acceptance Date: 14/4/2015
Electronic publication date: 31/7/2015
Collection year: 2015

open-access license: This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.
Abstract
Petroleum hydrocarbons are the most common environmental pollutants in the world and oil spills pose a great hazard to terrestrial and marine ecosystems. Oil pollution may arise either accidentally or operationally whenever oil is produced, transported, stored and processed or used at sea or on land. Oil spills are a major menace to the environment as they severely damage the surrounding ecosystems. To improve the survival and retention of the bioremediation agents in the contaminated sites, bacterial cells must be immobilized. Immobilized cells are widely tested for a variety of applications. There are many types of support and immobilization techniques that can be selected based on the sort of application. In this review article, we have discussed the potential of immobilized microbial cells to degrade petroleum hydrocarbons. In some studies, enhanced degradation with immobilized cells as compared to free living bacterial cells for the treatment of oil contaminated areas have been shown. It was demonstrated that immobilized cell to be effective and is better, faster, and can be occurred for a longer period