The toxicity of eight textile dyes was evaluated using two bioassays namely: Ames test and seed germination test. The Ames test is widely used for the evaluation of hazardous mutagenic effect of different chemicals, as a short-term screening test for environmental impact assessment. The eight-textile dyes and Eithidium bromide dye (as positive control) were tested with five "his" Salmonella typhimurium strains: TA 100; TA 98; TA 1535; TA 1537; TA 1538. Using six concentrations of each dye (2.5 microg/ml, 4.5 microg/ml, 9 microg/ml, 13.5 microg/ml, 18 microg/ml, and 22.5 microg/ml) revealed that, most of the dyes were mutagenic for the test strains used in this study. The high concentrations of dye eliminated microbial colonies due to the high frequency of mutation causing lethal effect on the cells. In this work the phytotoxicity of different soluble textile dyes was estimated by measuring the relative changes in seed germination of four plants: clover, wheat, tomato and lettuce. The changes in shooting percentages and root length as affected by dye were also measured. Seed germination percent and shoot growth as well as root length were recorded after 6 days of exposure to different concentrations of textile dyes in irrigation water. The results show that high concentrations of dyes were more toxic to seed germination as compared with the lower concentrations. However, the low concentrations of the tested dyes adversely affected the shooting percent significantly.

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Textile dyes are heavily used in factories for coloring different cloth materials. This work was designed to identify microorganisms capable of removing textile dyes, either by biodegradation or by biosorption. We expected to isolate microorganisms adapted to high dye concentrations from sites near textile industry complex. An experiment was conducted to study the efficiency of the isolates in removing textile dyes. The tested dyes were used as carbon and nitrogen sources for isolation of soil and/or water microorganisms capable of removing textile dyes wastes from factories effluent. The results indicated the low efficiency of both bacteria and actinomycetes in clean-up the effluent from the waste dyes in 10-21 days. On the other hand six fungal isolates were obtained by plating factory effluent on Martin's medium and media containing dyes as the sole source of carbon and nitrogen for growth. These isolates fell in two genera, Aspergillus and Trichoderma. Results of these studies revealed the potential capacity of these fungi to decolorize the tested dyes in comparatively short time (2-24 hours) indicating strong efficiency of dye bioremediation by the fungal isolates. Since the process involved is mostly fast interaction between the fungal mycelium and the dye in the media, the possible mechanism could be based on a biosorption of such chemicals on the intact fungal biomass, rather than direct biodegradation of the compounds.