Int.J.Curr.Microbiol.App.Sci (2014) 3(5): 869-880 869 Original Research Article Tannery effluents de-colorization efficiency of bacterial isolates from River Yamuna and industrial effluents Monika Asthana, Avnish Kumar*, Prerna Vikrant and Poonam Gupta Department of Biotechnology, School of Life Sciences, Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar University, Agra-282004, U.P, India *Corresponding author ABSTRACT Introduction Potable water is of vital importance for human existence. Water is useful for domestic, industrial and agricultural purposes. The past decade has seen remarkable impact of man on the environment due to unprecedented increase in population and rapid rate of urbanization as well as the intensification of the use of fragile and marginal ecosystems. Indian tannery Industry is one of the leading tannery industries in the world. It is also one of the highly polluting industries in the State. Tannery effluents are having potential to create pollution of ISSN: 2319-7706 Volume 3 Number 5 (2014) pp. 869-880 http://www.ijcmas.com Keywords Tannery effluents, Biodegradation, Thin layer chromatography, pure culture, spectro- photometric analysis Treatment methodologies of dye containing wastewater fall into three types: physical, chemical and biological. Biological methods have been proved to be superior over various physicochemical methods because of lower cost. Biological methods are safe for ecology also. Therefore, microorganism isolated from the site of pollution will be tool of interest for treatment of the effluent. We isolated 11 bacterial cultures from river Yamuna water and tannery industrial effluent (5 & 6 cultures respectively). Of these 7 cultures were classified as Gram negative cocci, 3 cultures as Gram negative bacilli and remaining one as Gram positive bacilli. All these isolates were screened for Acid Black dye de-colorization efficiency using bacterial culture in dye supplemented solid and liquid culture media. Finally, spectrophotometric analysis carried out to evaluate percent de-colorization of Acid Black dye and thin layer chromatography analysis was carried out to study dye de- colorization mechanism. All the cultures showed dye de-colorization property against tannery dye Acid Black (7.91% to 95.77%). The most promising cultures (encoded as S.5.2) from Tannery effluents showed more than 90% de-colorization while cultures (encoded as S.2.1 & S.5.1) from Yamuna water effluents showed >50% de-colorization. TLC analysis confirmed the dye degradation property of cultures S.5.2, as there were no dye specific spots in comparison to dye sample. The Yamuna water and effluent both have efficient dye de-colorization bacteria. TLC and bacterial pellet had showed decolouriszation of the dye by adsorption and degradation. Strain S.5.2 can be proposed for further development of tannery waste water clarification system.