Global Journal of Earth and Environmental Science

The study focussed on the phylogenetic relationship of hydrocarbon degrading fungi species in bioremediation. Hydrocarbon degrading fungi species were isolated from soil polluted with crude oil and treated with varying concentrations of agro-wastes. DNA sequencing was done on the consortia of fungi isolated. The evolutionary history was inferred by using the Maximum likelihood method based on the Tamura-Nei model. Initial tree(s) for the heuristic search were obtained automatically as follows. When the number of common sites was < 100 or less than one fourth of the total number of sites, the maximum parsimony method was used; otherwise BIONJ method with MCL distance matrix was used. The tree was drawn to scale, with branch lengths measured in the number of substitutions per site. The phylogenetic relationship between the fungal species revealed that the organisms were grouped into two clusters, cluster 1 consist of Aspergillus oryzae, Aspergillus flavus, Talaromyces solicola, Penicillium purpurogenum, Penicillium citrium and Penicillium daleae while cluster 2 consist of Cunninghamella polymorpha and Cunninghamella bertholletiae. The results revealed that Aspergillus oryzae differs from Aspergillus flavus, while other organisms had high relationship with each other. The Cunninghamella polymorpha and Cunninghamella bertholletiae were highly related. The sequencing and phylogenetic of the fungi species revealed the specific identity of the organism and showed the similarity between the identified species.