抄録
Antimony (Sb) is one of the toxic metal pollutants in the environment. The removal technology from toxic metals contaminated soil and water based on bacterial biosorption has many advantages in the high cost performance and diversity compared with well-known physicochemical methods. The screening for Sb-resistant bacteria as bio-adsorbents was performed in 96 surface soils that were collected from a wide variety of locations in Fukui Prefecture, Japan. As a result of this screening, four Sb-resistant bacterial strains were isolated at 37 °C under aerobic conditions in a nutrient medium containing up to 6000 mg/l Sb (as an antimonyl potassium tartrate complex). Detailed analyses of the morphological, biochemical, and 16S rRNA sequence of the most promising candidate among the four strains revealed that it was closely related to Citrobacter murliniae (99.4%). When grown on a nutrient agar plate containing Sb, this strain produced a yellow precipitate, which was concluded to be antimony sulfide, suggesting that the formation of antimony sulfide is an important mechanism of Sb detoxification.
