Assessment on removal efficiency of chromium by the isolated manglicolous fungi from Indian Sundarban mangrove forest: Removal and optimization using response surface methodology

The use of heavy metals in industries has increased recently. The effluents discharged from these industries are causing pollution on the surrounding environment and also causes wide spread damage. Fungi being an efficient mycosystem can treat these heavy metals successfully. In this study, Aspergillus sp. was isolated from soil from the Sunderban mangrove forest, West Bengal and was used in removing chromium (VI) from the aqueous solution. The parameters are optimized for enhancing the removal capacity of fungus to treat the chromium solution. This optimization process was done by single parameter optimization i.e., by taking different cultural media, inoculum volume % (0.5, 1, 2, 3) , pH (2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9), temperature (20ºC , 27ºC, 37ºC) and by using Response Surface Methodology (RSM) software to know the inter parameter interactions among the selected parameters and to optimize the parameters by which maximum removal of Chromium (VI) is obtained. It was observed that 98.96% removal was obtained using the isolated species and also observed that RSM optimization can better represent the experimental results.