Abstract
Phosphorus (P), an essential element required for crop growth has no substitute. The global food security depends on phosphorus availability in soil for crop production. World phosphorus reserves are fast depleting and with an annual increase of 2.3% in phosphorus demand, the current reserves will be exhausted in coming 50–100 years. India and other Western countries are forced to import phosphorus fertilizers at high costs to meet their agricultural demands due to uneven distribution of phosphate rocks on earth. The present study from India, aims to draw attention to an unnoticed source of phosphorus being wasted as parboiled rice mill effluent and subsequent bio-recovery of the valuable element from this unconventional source. The research was conducted in West Bengal, India, a state with the highest number of parboiled rice mills where its effluent carries on an average ~40 mg/L of soluble phosphorus. Technology to recover and recycle this wastewater P in India in a simple, inexpensive mode is yet to be optimized. Our strategy to use microalgae, Chlorella sp. and cyanobacteria, Cyanobacterium sp., Lyngbya sp., and Anabaena sp. to sequester the excess phosphorus from the effluent as polyphosphate inclusions and its subsequent recycling as slow and moderate release phosphorus biofertilizers to aid plant growth, preventing phosphorus loss and pollution, is a contemporary venture to meet the need of the hour. These polyphosphate accumulating microorganisms play a dual role of remediation and recovery of phosphorus, preliminarily validated in laboratory scale.
Highlights
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Microbiotechnology, Ecotoxicology and Bioremediation, a section of the journal Frontiers in Microbiology
The global food security depends on phosphorus availability in soil for crop production
Our strategy to use microalgae, Chlorella sp. and cyanobacteria, Cyanobacterium sp., Lyngbya sp., and Anabaena sp. to sequester the excess phosphorus from the effluent as polyphosphate inclusions and its subsequent recycling as slow and moderate release phosphorus biofertilizers to aid plant growth, preventing phosphorus loss and pollution, is a contemporary venture to meet the need of the hour
Summary
Phosphorus (P), the 11th most abundant element found in earth’s crust, is necessary for survival of life, as it is the main backbone of DNA, RNA, and ATP, the key components of a living cell (Cordell and White, 2011). Present estimations predict the total phosphate rock resources to be around 300 billion metric tons (MT) and the reserves as 71 billion MT (Subba Rao et al, 2015) These P reserves are fast dwindling and with an increase of 2.3% per annum in annual P demands (Adhya et al, 2015), the current reserves are expected to be depleted in the coming 50–100 years (Cordell et al, 2009). India imports around 90% of its P fertilizer requirement to overcome P deficiency in soil and enhance crop production to meet the demands of its fast growing population (Bagyaraj et al, 2015) and is the largest importer of phosphate rocks in the world, importing about 30% of the total world trade (Subba Rao et al, 2015). Our research presented here falling in the same line, aims to draw attention to an unheeded point source of P pollution in the environment—the parboiled rice mill effluent (RME), from where phosphorus can be recovered and used in future as biofertilizers for plant growth improvement
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