چکیده (انگلیسی):

Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), the chlorinated derivatives of biphenyl, are one of themost prevalent, highly toxic and persistent groups of contaminants in the environment.The objective of this study was to investigate the biodegradation of PCBs in northeastern(Heilongjiang Province), northern (Shanxi Province) and eastern China (Shanghai munici-pality). From these areas, nine soil samples were screened for PCB-degrading bacteria usinga functional complementarity method. The genomic 16S rDNA locus was amplified and theproducts were sequenced to identify the bacterial genera. Seven Pseudomonas strains wereselected to compare the capacity of bacteria from different regions to degrade biphenyl byHPLC. Compared to the biphenyl content in controls of 100%, the biphenyl content wentdown to 3.7% for strain P9-324, 36.3% for P2-11, and 20.0% for the other five strains. Theseresults indicate that a longer processing time led to more degradation of biphenyl. PCB-degrading bacterial strains are distributed differently in different regions of China.© 2016 Sociedade Brasileira de Microbiologia. Published by Elsevier Editora Ltda. This isan open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).