A framework for accessibility aware e-content in Oman

Frequent incidences of oil pollutions have been reported in Oman, some of high magnitude that caused severe impacts on terrestrial and marine environments. Oil pollution poses serious threats for the Sultanate s economy, fishing industry, public health, water desalination plants, underground water, agriculture soils and tourism. So far, there are very few national projects that deal with oil spills and ways to treat them. This project aims at testing various bioremediation approaches (mainly biostimulation and bioaugmentation) for the cleanup of oil pollution using indigenous bacteria under the extreme environmental conditions of the Gulf region. We will investigate the use of oil-polluted cyanobacterial mats and isolated cyanobacterial consortia for bioremediation. We hypothesize that the oilpolluted ecosystems of Oman are rich in novel halophilic and thermophilic oildegrading bacteria, whose biodegradation activity can be increased by the addition of limited nutrients and optimizing environmental conditions. The presence of cyanobacteria in cyanobacterial consortia will facilitate degradation processes by fueling the oil-degrading bacteria with necessary oxygen, nitrogen and organics via their nitrogen fixation, photosynthesis and fermentation processes, thus circumventing the expensive use of fertilizers and chemicals normally used in the cleanup of oil pollution. In the proposed work, biostimulation of indigenous bacteria through optimization of environmental conditions and the addition of inorganic and organic fertilizers will be compared. Bioaugmentation, which involves the addition of bacteria, will be carried out after isolation and characterization of halophilic and thermophilic oil-degrading bacterial consortia. The response of indigenous microbial communities to treatments will be monitored using state-of-art molecular techniques such as denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE), automated rRNA intergenic spacer analysis (ARISA), fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) and 16S rRNA cloning. Bacterial consortia that are relevant to oil biodegradation will be tested for their ability to bioremediate polluted areas under in situ conditions. The proposed research will enable us to gain a better fundemental understanding of polluted ecosystems in Oman and bacterial diversity and activity under multiple extreme coditions. The project will lay the foundation for bioremediation of oil polluted ecosystems in Oman, help in capacity building and training of Omani students and contribute to the establishment of a bioremediation research nucleus at Sultan Qaboos University with most modern techniques.