Economic Production and Oil Recovery Efficiency of a Lipopeptide Biosurfactant from a Novel Marine Bacterium Bacillus simplex

The use and commercial applications of biosurfactants in the petroleum industries have been raised during the past decades. Marine bacteria and their efficiency in crude oil recovery has been less studied than terrestrial strain, hence this present study. A novel marine bacterium Bacillus simplex having promising biosurfactant production was isolated from a petroleum hydrocarbon-contaminated coastal sea sediment samples of Nagapattinam fishing harbor, Tamil Nadu, India. This strain showed most economical biosurfactant production with an agro-industrial waste substrate, sunflower oil cake at 54th h time incubation along with the cultural conditions of 20 ppt salinity, 35 °C temperature, and pH 7. The produced biosurfactant was purified, which was accounted at 908 ± 7 mg/L on dry weight basis. The biosurfactant was identified as lipopeptide with a molecular mass of 1111.1 Da which was deduced using TLC, biochemical estimation methods, FT-IR, NMR, and MALDI-TOF MS analysis. Furthermore, this purified lipopeptide surfactant showed consistent and enhanced crude oil recovering efficiency under different salinity conditions (0–30%). Based on the above facts, the isolated novel marine bacterium proved its cheaper production of novel biosurfactant and its promising oil recovering efficiency even at hypersaline conditions. Further, this is the first report of a biosurfactant from the bacterium Bacillus simplex.