Perspectives for the genetics engineering of hydrocarbon oxidizing bacteria

Microbial hydrocarbon oxidation has interested biochemists and biotechnologists associated with the petrochemical industry for decades (34,40,55). While much of the initial interest was in the use of hydrocarbon-oxidizing organisms in petroleum prospecting, more recent attention has focused on the use of whole cells or microbial enzyme systems to carry out very specific biodegradations or bioconversions. Two developments in the past ten years have made it a realistic possibility to envisage the rational design and construction of microorganisms for specific breakdown or interconversion of hydrocarbon substrates: (i) Rheinwald's observation that the genes for camphor oxidation are located on a transmissible plasmid (74,75), which quickly led to the discovery of many other transmissible plasmids in soil organisms that encode catabolic pathways for hydrocarbon substrates, and (ii) the development of in vitro and in vivo methods for the molecular cloning of DNA segments into a variety of plasmid vectors