Identification and Isolation of Heavy Metal (Copper) Resistant Bacteria

Over the years, with the active spread and development of the industries, Heavy Metal, which are either used, or produced as byproducts by numerous manufacturing, industrial, refining and mining processes have become ubiquitous, persistent environmental pollutants. India too not exempted from such devasting environmental degradation caused by these pollutants. This study develops a method to accelerate the process of removal by encouraging the microbial and associated biota to degrade and/ or remove pollutants from the identified sites and also helps in isolation and cellular characterization of bacterial isolates. The area under study is the main sewage of Aligarh, U.P., lock industry in Talanagri and Surendra Nagar, Aligarh, from where soil in sterilized plastic bags and effluent samples in polypropylene bottles were collected. Processing of the samples for the isolation of tolerant strains was carried out in Mangalayatan University, Aligarh, which is followed by their cellular characterization.