Isolation of potential biosurfactant producer from palm oil mill effluent

Biosurfactants are amphiphilic compound which are produced on living surfaces, mainly on surfaces of microorganisms. Oil based pollutants usually occurs due to human activities for example transportation, palm oil refineries, petroleum refineries, waste cooking oil and etc. The use of biosurfactant is a better alternative in handling the oil pollution due to its characteristics where it is safer, easy to degrade, cheaper, better environmental compatibility and higher substrate selectivity. The objective of this study is to isolate and screen potential biosurfactant producer from palm oil mill effluent (POME) and further identified using 16S rDNA analysis. Six potential biosurfactant producing bacteria strains were isolated on the Minimal Salt Medium
(MSM) agar supplemented with 1% (v/v) crude palm oil as carbon source. The isolates were labelled as F1S11, F1S21, F1S31, F1S12, F1S22 and F1S32. In order to screen the presence of biosurfactant producer, several test namely drop collapse test, emulsification test and oil spreading test were conducted. All the isolates showed positive results for drop collapse test. The highest emulsification activity resulted by isolate F1S12 which is 32%. In oil spreading activity, isolate F1S12
showed the highest reading with the diameter of 1.7 cm. Among six isolates, two of the isolates F1S12 and F1S22 were selected to undergo the molecular identification
by 16S rDNA analysis. 16S rDNA was successfully amplified from isolate F1S22. DNA band was observed at a range between 1000bp — 1500bp. However, due to the time constraint, PCR product was not be able to send for sequencing to identify the genus and species.