Role of oxygenases in guiding diverse metabolic pathways in the bacterial degradation of low-molecular-weight polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons: A review

Abstract

Widespread environmental pollution by polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) poses an immense risk to the environment. Bacteria-mediated attenuation has a great potential for the restoration of PAH-contaminated environment in an ecologically accepted manner. Bacterial degradation of PAHs has been extensively studied and mining of biodiversity is ever expanding the biodegradative potentials with intelligent manipulation of catabolic genes and adaptive evolution to generate multiple catabolic pathways. The present review of bacterial degradation of low-molecular-weight (LMW) PAHs describes the current knowledge about the diverse metabolic pathways depicting novel metabolites, enzyme-substrate/metabolite relationships, the role of oxygenases and their distribution in phylogenetically diverse bacterial species.

Keywords::

• Biodegradation
• PAHs
• dioxygenase
• carcinogenic
• biodiversity

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge Professor P. K. Chakrabartty for reviewing the manuscript, Dr. S. Kundu for helping with reference documents and Bose Institute, Kolkata, India for financial support. S. Mallick and J. Chakraborty are also grateful to Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Government of India for awarding Junior and Senior Research Fellowships (CSIR adhoc and CSIR scheme: 37(1172)/03/EMR-II, respectively).

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.