Latin American Biodeterioration Society Meeting Abstracts

Abstract

Heavy metals are one of the utmost hazardous elements on the earth which contaminate soil by several natural as well as anthropogenic actions. Industrial solid waste, inland effluent, by-products of mining, metallurgical smelting, electroplating are some major sources of heavy metals. In present scenario, these toxicants are affecting mankind, either directly by causing diseases, or indirectly by diminishing soil health, water quality and crop productivity. Under these circumstances, bioremediation is considered as the most propitious approach than the traditional methods to treat polluted lands, as the traditionally used physical and chemical remediation methods are costly and at the same time produce large amounts of toxic intermediate products. Different kinds of potent microbes such as bacteria, fungi, algae as well as some extremophiles show high efficiency in bioremediation processes. Furthermore, several rhizobial bacteria that live in association with roots of other plants also perform bioremediation very efficiently. It has been shown that immobilization of microbes with ample carbon source can enhance the potential of these microbes in performing bioremediation. In recent times, several researchers have developed bioengineered microbes with desired genes incorporated into them that elevate their capacity of remediation. Concomitantly, another school of scientists are trying to develop or augment the multifunctioning bioremediation approaches like rhizoremediation, to detoxify heavy-metals and increase crop-productivity parallelly in agroecosystem. With recent technological advancement, scientists have developed engineered microbes that act as heavy metal biosensors, which are not only used to lower the soil toxicants but also exploited to detect the presence of heavy metals in soil. Here in this chapter, we have tried to cover the present status and recent promising advancements of microbial bioremediation technologies.