Microbial Degradation of Nonsteroidal Anti-inflammatory Drug Ibuprofen

Abstract

Pharmaceutical consumption is gradually increasing because of improved health care systems in India and worldwide. The occurrence of pharmaceuticals in the environment has been recognized as an emerging issue. These pharmaceuticals get excreted with urine and feces as parent compound or as their metabolites after the requisite action in the body. On the other hand, pharmaceutical compounds (PCs) are also directly disposed of through pharmaceutical manufacturing plants, hospitals, veterinary drug use. Pharmaceuticals found in the environment even at a very low concentration from ng/L to μg/L have toxic effects on the terrestrial and aquatic organisms. Studies have shown that pharmaceuticals enter the organisms through sewage water and animal carcasses. It magnifies through bioaccumulation in the food chain. The proper degradation process of pharmaceuticals has become the need of the hour to get rid of the harmful impacts of pharmaceuticals on the environment. Many studies have been focused on the degradation of pharmaceuticals. Most of them were based on physical and chemical treatment but they were not so much efficient. The degradation with the microbial strains was found very efficient and effective. In the present work, the degradation of ibuprofen is performed by selected bacterial strain. Various growth factors, micronutrients, and process parameters were provided during the degradation studies. These factors and parameters supply the natural source of food and energy for the bacterial growth for enhancing the degradation rate. In the present study, an experiment was done to observe the potential of selected bacterial strain for the degradation of pharmaceutical wastewater. Optimum conditions for this degradation were these: dextrose and peptone concentration 1.5% (w/v), with 2% (w/v) inoculums size at pH 7 incubated at 25 °C at 150 rpm. After providing these growth factors and process parameters the degradation rate was reached more than 78% in terms of chemical oxygen demand (COD) removal. Thus, this study illustrates the great potential to develop microbial degradation of pharmaceutical waste, which is effective, reliable and lowers the environmental risk.