Abstract
Phytoremediation, the use of plants and their associated microbes to accumulate, detoxify and/or stabilise contaminants, is an environment-friendly and sustainable means of remediating contaminated soil and water. Phytoremediation has been an important aspect of constructed wetlands, which have been used successfully to detoxify large volumes of wastewater with dilute concentrations of contaminants, including petroleum, hydrocarbons, chlorinated solvents, pesticides, explosives, heavy metals and radio nucleids. The most important requirement for Phytoremediation is the use of fast growing high biomass plants that are capable of uptake and accumulation of large amounts of toxic metals in their aboveground harvestable parts. In recent years major scientific progress has been made in understanding the physiological mechanism of metal uptake and transport in these plants. Since most metal hyper accumulators are slow growing and have low biomass, bioengineering of non accumulators having high biomass is essential for effective phytoremediation. Plants adopted for phytoremediation are usually found to exhibit the specific property due to the presence of the special genes coding for it. These plants are usually seen in area where metal ores exist. The genes responsible for this resistance by such plants are isolated and expressed in wide variety of transgenic plants so that they can be made resistant as well. This increases the number of plant species that can be used for such purpose. It is also possible with the help of biotechnology to increase the gene expression for maximum resistance. Certain plants are seen to show increased resistance under the presence of certain microbes. Biotechnology makes it possible to isolate such microbes and enrich the soil so as to enhance the phytoremediation by respective plants. This paper reviews the biotechnological approaches to improve plants’ ability to tolerate different pollutants and phytoremediation efficiency and highlights future challenges
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