engleski

Biodegradation of Amoxicillin

The antibiotic residues in the environment is a huge problem nowadays, since they represent one of the main discoveries in a medicinal field. Therefore, the usage of antibiotics is increasing rapidly but it is getting out of control also. Sometimes unnecessary and improper consumption has increased the levels of residual antibiotics in ecosystems and some bacterial communities, which results with antibiotics losing their primary activity, bacterial function changing and finally bad effects on human health. Environmental antibiotic contamination should be diminished by regulating the causes of occurrence and antibiotic discharge by detection and quantification of the antibiotics and the characterization of their behavior in the environment, which should all be summarized in risk assessments.1 Meanwhile, the removal of the antibiotic residues from the nature is also very important. The accumulation with the highest concentration of the residues in the environment is in the places where the antibiotics are most commonly used and thus are the greatest source of pollution. Such places are livestock farms, hospitals and pharmaceutical factories. Antibiotics eventually end in the ground ; soil and aquatic environment through the waste water, sludge and manure used in agriculture, and finally in the food we are eating.2 In this work, the process of biodegradation of amoxicillin was studied under batch conditions using pure environmental bacterial cultures of Pseudomonas aeruginosa (Gramm-negative) and Bacillus subtilis (Gramm-positive).The focus was on amoxicillin, as it is an antibiotic that is commonly used nowadays to treat diseases and is therefore not uncommonly found in the environment as a residual antibiotic. Biodegradation was monitored by UHPLC method with gradient elution and reversed phase column. Identification of degradation products was also performed by the method LC-MS, focusing on scanning the masses of the main peaks that grow and change the most during the sampling period.

antibiotic residues, environment contamination, amoxicillin, biodegradation

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