ABSTRACT
The goal of the work described here was to find an organism that might be used to detoxify the selenium found in saline drainage water collected by subsurface drains in the western side of the San Joaquin Valley, California. The transport of this water via the San Luis Drain to the Kesterson Reservoir from 1978 to 1983 led to the selenium contamination problem discovered there in 1983 [1-3]. The drainage water was found to contain about 300 ~g/L selenium-Se (primarily as selenate) and 50 mg/L nitrate-N [3].
