Mangroves are vital ecosystems for coastal protection. Their features make them a unique environment, with high biological diversity and activity. Salinity and organic matter availability vary in different parts of mangrove forests

[5]. Beneath a thin aerobic surface layer, mangrove sediments are predominantly anaerobic, i.e., anaerobic biochemical processes are catalyzed by sediment microbial communities [6]. In previous studies about microbial populations, it was shown that Alphaproteobacteria dominated the bacterial community in a non-disturbed Brazilian mangrove sediment [5] and that after crude oil exposure, bacterial groups such as Anaerolinea decrease in population abundance whereas find more Deltaproteobacteria increase [7]. The anoxic nature of mangrove sediment is a key feature that allows oil accumulation in such ecosystems [8]. For example, after an oil spill it is possible to detect higher amounts of oil in deeper sediment Angiogenesis inhibitor than at the surface, showing that oil tends to percolate through the sediment down to deeper layers [9, 10]. Several microorganisms are capable of degrading aliphatic and aromatic hydrocarbons under anoxic conditions [11]. Boopathy [12] studied diesel degradation in estuarine sediment microcosms

in the presence of different terminal electron acceptors. In the presence of nitrate, sulphate and carbonate, 99% of the crude oil was removed within 510 days, whereas check details stimulating only sulphate reduction, methanogenesis, or nitrate Loperamide reduction resulted in 62, 43, and 40% oil removal, respectively. Boopathy and colleagues observed the same interesting results on anaerobic oil hydrocarbon degradation in follow-up studies, showing that sulphate-reducing condition is the most efficient redox condition in experiments using individual electron acceptors [13, 14]. Petroleum hydrocarbon degradation pathways are distinct. It is believed that n-alkane-utilizing strains do not grow with aromatic hydrocarbons,

and vice versa [15]. There are two elucidated mechanisms for anaerobic alkane degradation. One involves fumarate addition to the alkane subterminal carbon to produce alkylsuccinate compounds, and in the other process the alkane is carboxylated [16]. The enzymes responsible for fumarate addition in anaerobic alkane metabolism are alkylsuccinate synthases, AssA1 and AssA2, encoded by assA1 and assA2 genes, respectively [17, 18]. Aromatic hydrocarbons are converted to a few central intermediates before being further metabolized. The most common central intermediate of the anaerobic aromatic hydrocarbon transformation is benzoyl-CoA [19], which is then converted to dienoyl-CoA. The next set of reactions ends with a 6-OCH-hydrolase enzyme opening the aromatic ring of the compound. This enzyme is encoded by bamA which is considered as a good genetic marker for studying anaerobic aromatic hydrocarbon degradation, since it contains highly conserved regions [20].