Fungal Bioremediation of Phenolic Wastewaters in an Airlift Reactor

Of the various types of industry‐generated effluents, those containing organic pollutants such as phenols are generally difficult to remediate. There is a need to develop new technologies that emphasize the destruction of these pollutants rather than their disposal. In this work the white rot fungus, Trametes pubescens , was demonstrated to be an effective bioremediation agent for the treatment of phenolic wastewaters. An airlift loop reactor was optimized, in terms of volumetric oxygen transfer rate ( K L a = 0.45 s ‐ 1 ), to provide an environment suited to rapid growth of T . pubescens (μ = 0.25 day ‐ 1 ) and a particularly efficient growth yield on glucose of 0.87 g biomass·g glucose ‐ 1 . The phenolic effluent was shown to be a paramorphogen, influencing fungal pellet morphology in the reactor, as well as increasing laccase enzyme activity by a factor of 5 over the control, to a maximum of 11.8 U·mL ‐ 1 . This increased activity was aided by the feeding of nonrepressing amounts (0.5 g·L ‐ 1 ) of glucose to the reactor culture. To our knowledge the degradation results represent the highest rate of removal (0.033 g phenol·g biomass ‐ 1 ·day ‐ 1 ) of phenolic compounds from water reported for white rot fungi.