Critical Review

Name : Amanulia Sadikin

Student ID : 617 21065 23
Title of Article : Biodegradation of Oil-based paint by Bacillus species
Monocultures Isolated from
The Paint Warehouses

Summary
The aim of the study was to investigate the ability of three different
species of Bacillus to degrade the oil-based paint in seven warehouses
which were located in Sukkur and Khairpur in Pakistan. Environmental
pollution from oil-based paint became the reason of the research due to
the evidence found that the painting was the trigger of cancer in human
(IARC 1990). The other reasons, investigating the contaminated soil could
be an ideal source of microbes-degrading. There were several methods
for soil-cleaning, but among others bioremediation was chosen due to
some reasons. First, according to Mohsanzadeh (2012) bioremediation
has been proven to be the safest, cost-effective detoxification and
environment-friendly process. Second, in Pakistan, bioremediation was
still less usage and unexplored research. Furthermore, bacteria were
chosen to be the agent because they were faster to mineralize the paint
than the fungi through combined metabolic mode of aerobic-anaerobic
reaction in the form of consortia (Chang et al. 2004).

The potential of three Bacillus as biodegradation was tested by

enumeration, screening and taxonomic characterization. The paint-
polluted soil of the warehouses was taken as the sample. There were two
types of sample used (1) the experimental sample with addition of glucose
as the carbon source (2) the control sample without glucose adds on.
Moreover, the sample isolated in mineral salt medium broth (MSM) and
enriched with oil paint (ALBA synthetic Enamel, white-32) then observed
in 2 weeks at 370 C to see the activity of the isolate.

The result shows that Bacillus with strain NAP1, NAP2 and NAP4
have high removal ability as 66.5%, 61.4% and 55.9% respectively. The
percentages represent the capability of Bacillus species as oil-based-
degrading bacteria. The biodegradation efficiencies were higher with the
additional of glucose. Based on some references, Bacillus species use the
pollutant as sole sources of energy and produce the non-toxic end
product. The presence of glucose not only as carbon sources but also as
an agent of affinity. Yet, the result of this research needed to be
investigated more.

Critique

The authors have stated the clear and strong reasons why they
conducted this research in introduction part of the article that could
become the strong point of this article. The authors had a good writing
style and the content of the article were easy to understand. Yet, there
were still many parts that should be fixed. The part needed to evaluate
were the materials, methods, and the incoherent data.

For the material, the authors did not mention the brand of the oil-
based paint and the material on the paint itself. So, it could not be known
what kind of substance that the bacteria could degrade from the paint
because every paint has their own materials. Moreover, the methods used
to evaluate the number of bacteria in this article seem too complicated,
the author could use the easiest way to calculate the bacteria by using
colony counter or haemacytometer instead of observing the turbidity of the
sample in shake flask that was unclear for this research. Also, the authors
put some unimportant figure such as figure 2 sub-cultured on nutrient
agar.

Furthermore, the data presented by the author were incoherent. In

Fig. 4 the author presented the data using line graph, there were three
subjects observed (1) % paint removal (2) incubation time (3) Growth OD.
A, C and E were the graphs for experimental groups, while B, D and F
were the control groups. In experimental graphs, it can be seen that the
higher were the incubation days, there were still the growth OD about 0.3,
while the growth OD in control group almost 0. So, the result of the
experiment was incorrect, that should be when the incubation days getting
higher, the percentage of the growth OD should become lower. The last,
the addition of sugar on this experiment made it difficult to apply because
it was not affordable.

Finally, I suggested to the authors to recheck the unclear and

incoherent data as well the parts of the article that were not needed.