Use of Unenriched Cultures Undefined Natural Consortia

Laboratory experiments using natural consortia under defined conditions have particular value from several points of view. They are of direct environmental relevance, and their use minimizes the ambiguities in extrapolation from the results of studies with pure cultures. They provide valuable verification of the results of studies with pure cultures and make it possible to evaluate the extent to which the results of such studies may justifiably be extended to the natural environment. It should be appreciated, however, that in some cases the habitats from which the inoculum was taken might already have been exposed to xenobiotics so that natural enrichment (preexposure) could already have taken place. This has been discussed in Chapter 4. 

Extensive studies on the effect of substrate concentration and on the bioavailability of the substrate to the appropriate microorganisms have employed samples of natural lake water supplemented with suitable nutrients. There are few additional details that need to be added since the experimental methods are straightforward and present no particular difficulties. Considerable use has also been made of a comparable methodology to determine the fate of agrochemicals in the terrestrial environment. 

Because of the difficulty in obtaining pure cultures of anaerobic bacteria, use has been made of anaerobic sediment slurries in laboratory experiments. In some of these, although no enrichment was deliberately incorporated, experiments were carried out over long periods of time in the presence of contaminated sediments and adaptation of the natural flora to the xenobiotic during exposure in the laboratory might therefore have taken place. The design of these experiments may also inevitably result in interpretative difficulties. A few illustrations are provided  

Although the results of experiments on the dechlorination of pentachlorophenol (Bryant et al. 1991) enabled elucidation of the pathways to be elucidated, this study also revealed one of the limitations in the use of such procedures. Detailed interpretation of the kinetics of pentachlorophenol degradation using dichlorophenol-adapted cultures was equivocal due to carryover of phenol from the sediment slurries. 

The biodegradation of acenaphthene and naphthalene under denitrifying conditions was examined in soil-water slurries (Mihelcic and Luthy 1988), though in this case only analyses for the concentrations of the initial substrates were carried out. 

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