Chapter 17 - Potential use of yeast in heavy metals eradication from the contaminated wastewater: A sustainable approach

Abstract

Heavy metal pollution represents an important environmental problem due to the toxic effects of metals, and their accumulation throughout the food chain leads to serious ecological and health problems. At high concentrations, both essential and nonessential metals can damage cell membranes, alter enzyme specificity, disrupt cellular function, and damage the structure of DNA. Several toxic effects are associated with exposure to toxic metal ions, including increased incidence of certain cancers, toxic toward living cells, tissue, and organisms serious damage to such major organs as the lung, liver, and kidney, pulmonary fibrosis, and chronic bronchitis, skin ulcers, lung cancer and mutagenic effect on bacteria and impairment of primary immune responses. Cadmium is one of the major metal pollutants and is carcinogenic, embryotoxic, teratogenic, and mutagenic and may cause hyperglycemia, reduced immune potency, and anemia, due to its interference with iron metabolism. Chromium toxicity is related to genetic imbalance, protein structure deformation, and various energy metabolism disorders. Lead (Pb), another metal pollutant, has mutagenic, genotoxic, and carcinogenic effects. Severe Pb toxicity causes sterility, abortions, neonatal mortality, and morbidity. Arsenic is particularly notorious for its exceptional toxicity and potential carcinogenic effects. A wide variety of microorganisms such as bacteria, yeast, algae, protozoa, and fungi are found in waters receiving industrial effluents. They have developed strategies to resist, tolerate, metabolize, and detoxify these toxic substances. Among such microorganisms, yeasts showed a fairly high capability to uptake metals from the environment and their use is beneficial because bioremediation has advantages over other techniques as it is cheap, nondestructive, and contamination remains localized.