CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Boron is widespread in the environment. Although contaminatedsoils are hard to recover different strategies have been investigated inthe recent years. Bioremediation is one of the most studied because it iseco-friendly and less costly than other techniques. The aim of thisresearch was to evaluate whether two Streptomyces strains isolated fromboron contaminated soils in Salta, Argentina, may help remove boron fromsuch soils. For this, they were grown in different liquid media with twoboric acid concentrations and their specific growth rate and specificboric acid consumption rate were determined. Both strains showed greatcapacity to remove boron from the media. However, increasing boric acidconcentrations affected negatively the specific growth rate and increasedthe specific boric acid consumption rate. We also observed by electronicmicroscopy that both strains form some sort of boron-biomineral in thepresence of boric acid, probably due to an adaptive response developed bythe cells to the exposure, for which many proteins were differentiallysynthetized. This strategy to tolerate high concentrations of boron byimmobilizing it in biominerals has not been previously described, to thebest of our knowledge, and may have a great potential

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