Abstract

Industrial activities often generate by-products that are difficult to degrade, harmful to the environment and, toxic to most of the life forms on earth. Heavy metals are toxic elements that usually present in industrial effluents whose effective management in an eco-friendly manner is important. The treatment of metal-contaminated water through the conventional method of precipitation, ion exchange, electrochemical and reverse osmosis is costly and also likely to generate secondary pollutants. In this review study, we focus on the advantage of bacterial bioremediation to deal with metal toxicity. Bacterial bioremediation offers an eco-friendly and cost-effective alternative for treatment of metal contaminated industrial effluent. Bacteria are considered one of the important microbial systems to be employed for bioremediation purposes. Bacteria utilize the mechanisms of biosorption and bioaccumulation which involve ATP-dependent substrate specific sequestration to remediate the contaminants through redox reactions and enzyme-transformation methods. Bacterial cell wall offers potential chemisorption sites for binding and transportation of metal ion to the bacterial cytoplasm. The potential of bacterial bioremediation can be improved by adopting strategies, providing favorable environment, and using stress adapted strains consisting high metabolic activity, metal selectivity, membrane transport system, efficient biocatalytic and chaperone production ability. The bioremediation efficiency of bacteria is expected to improve many folds through the techniques of genetic modifications involving mutation, plasmid exchange and transposons etc. This study may throw light on the detailed mechanism and strategies adapted by bacteria for the bioremediation of toxic heavy metal ions and open a new way to handle metal toxicity efficiently.

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