Published on October 2013 | Environmental biotechnology

Heavy metal tolerance and antibiotic sensitivity of bacterial strains isolated from tannery effluent

The pollution of the environment with toxic heavy metals is spreading throughout the world along with industrial progress. In the present study, the heavy metal tolerance and antibiotic sensitivity was determined for the bacterial strains isolated from tannery waste water. All the three strains tested were found to exert similar pattern of resistance towards all the heavy metals except chromium where there is very poor growth of all the strains. Pseudomonas aerugunosa and E.coli showed high resistance to cadmium whereas Bacillus subtilis showed high resistance to mercury. Bacillus subtilis and Pseudomonas aerugunosa showed resistance to 50% of the antibiotics tested whereas E.Coli showed resistance to 83% of the antibiotics tested