Exploring fungal potential for enhancement of environment

Abstract

Inadequate effluent disposal has caused damage to the environment worldwide. This study aimed to perform a scientometric analysis of studies exploiting fungi applied to improve the quality of effluents. We used Web of Science, Scopus and Pubmed databases to search for publications between 1980 and 2023. The pollutants and effluent quality parameters most commonly addressed in scientific literature were identified, revealing trends and gaps in the field. A correlation analysis was performed between the variables Research and Development (R&D), gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, and number of inhabitants per country to investigate whether these variables are correlated with the number of research studies in each country. In addition, a linear regression was performed to investigate the effect of the number of inhabitants per country of each country on the number of studies. A total of 11183 articles were obtained, of which 2001 were identified as related to the main topic, and then more than 30 different types of pollutants were removed, such as primarily including dyes (951), phenolic compounds (682), and heavy metals (562). Concerning effluent quality parameters, chemical oxygen demand was most frequently mentioned in the articles obtained from the literature review (620). The world’s most populous countries produce the largest number of studies related to the topic. Our results highlight the bioremediation potential importance of fungi in the scientific literature, even under inhospitable conditions for microorganisms (such as toxicity, low temperatures, and high acidity), reducing environmental damage in aquatic environments and mitigating harm to public health.