Sampling and Identification of Toxic Cyanobacteria in the Landfill Leachate

Abstract

The knowledge on anthropogenic environments have shown increasing interest around worldwide nowadays. Dum** of solid waste creates landfill leachate when it is exposed to rain. Landfill leachate proliferates the toxic photosynthetic cyanobacteria which create harmful algal blooms (cyanoHABs). The toxic cyanobacteria produce a variety of cyanotoxins which are microcystins, saxitoxins, cylindrospermopsin, and anatoxin-a; these toxins have different mode of action such as hepatotoxins, neurotoxins, cytotoxins, and gastrointestinal toxins. Cyanotoxins affects the growth or leads to mortality to the biodiversity which dependent of that particular environment. This is important to take care because the overall food chain is affected due to cyanoHABs in the aquatic environment. The cyanobacteria genera occur in the toxic environment can be identified by through its morphological structure using light microscopy, but the confirmatory way of detection till species level is only through PCR amplification of that specific gene which codes for the production of cyanotoxin. Thus, the molecular technique is always reliable for detection of cyanotoxin synthesising gene through specific primers (e.g., mcyE-F2 and mcyE-R4 is used in detecting mycE gene). The most widespread of the cyanotoxins are the peptide toxins in the class called microcystins; there are around 80 known microcystins, including Microcystin-LR, which is generally considered one of the most toxic.