ANUDURGA GAJENDIRAN AND JAYANTHI ABRAHAM
Abstract
Mercury pollution remains a contemporary problem. The effective removal of mercury from polluted soil or water has been possible with the help of bacteria, fungi, algae and few plants with growing application of bioremediation. Bioremediation has proved to be the most cost effective and effective method in removal of toxicity from the environment. This investigation was aimed at removal and adsorption of mercury present in soil samples collected from marine and terrestrial soil employing fungi. Different concentrations of mercury were used in the sample and the growth of microorganisms was observed. Three fungal strains were found to have a pronounced growth in mercury contaminated soil and thus were employed for this study. MIC as erformed to study the fungal growth through biomass assay of fungus and various sophisticated technique have been applied to investigate the adsorption of mercury and these methods includes atomic absorption spectroscopy (AAS), X-ray powder diffraction (XRD) and atomic force microscopy (AFM).