Phosphate removal using recombinant bacteria with cytoplasmic phosphate binding protein

Abstract

In the present work, we constructed a recombinant Escherichia coli with cytoplasmic-expressed phosphate-binding protein (PBP) and investigated its phosphate removal in water phase. When the recombinant bacteria were cultured for 6 h to treat phosphate, the removal efficiencies were 90, 49, and 41% for the treatment of 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0 mg/L phosphate, respectively, indicating good specific phosphate removal of our developed system. Also, cell densities of 2.5 and 5.0 Optical density resulted in high phosphate removal efficiencies and ~80% of 2.0 mg/L phosphate was efficiently removed. A novel biotechnology developed in this study could be effectively employed for resolving eutrophication problem in water body.