Effect of pollutants on biochemical properties of microorganisms

Abstract

Introduction. The development of different ways of identifying hazard of substances, polluting the environment, that are alternative to routine methods for assessing health of different professional groups of people, as well as to tests on laboratory animals, has been assessed and summarized in a number of papers, and there is a growing volume of actual data on this issue. The analyzing pathogenic properties of microflora, isolated from polluted habitats or changed under the effect of pollutants, allows both assessing the risk of diseases with microbial etiology and identifying the influence of modifying factors on this process. Materials and methods. The research was performed on 150 cultures of Klebsiella pneumoniae, exposed to diethanolamine, phenol, sulfuric and nitric acids, taken at the level of their threshold limit value. The same cultures incubated without pollutants were used as a control group. Pathogenic factors were determined with the use of traditional methods, our modified methods (RNAase activity) and standard agents, kits and media. Results. The contact with all the pollutants resulted in a fair increase in adhesive, anti-Ig, lysozyme, anti-lysozyme and RNAase activities of microorganisms, their resistance to antibacterial action of blood serum, as well as to damaging action of lactoferrin. The bacteria increased their ability to synthesize a substance, immunologically similar to human lactoferrin. At the same time, there was a decrease in lipase activity, primarily referred to factors determining the bacterial ability to survive in the environment. Discussion. Therefore, the paper results can be presented as follows: being an independent and holistic section of modern microbiology, bacterial biochemistry unites the issues appeared to be far from each other - changes in factors of pathogenicity and persistence of microorganisms and technogenic changeability of the environment. Being quite urgent today, this problem may become aggravated in the course of further technological progress.