Strategic management of contaminated water bodies: Omics, genome-editing and other recent advances in phytoremediation

Abstract

Due to excessive industrialization, urbanization and rising level of pollutants, the water bodies are continuously exposed to diverse group of toxic pollutants whose concentration, chemical forms and bioavailability in the aqueous system are governed by natural geochemical cycles as well as human activities. Chemical form or species of these toxic compounds or heavy metals is governed by the prevailing specific physical and chemical parameters like pH, salinity, dissolved organics, hardness and sedimentary load which impacts their mobility, bio-availability and hence toxicity. To overcome the challenging situation, an increased emphasis has been given on in-situ innovative technologies like phytoremediation, capable of detoxification of contaminated water bodies. The use of inherent aquatic plants along with recent omics tools can improve their phytoremediation ability to a great extent. These plants have an extensive root system which can filter and immobilize sediments, contaminants, fertilizer and pesticide run-off thereby reducing water pollution. Thus, the assortment and improvement of plants phytoremediation ability using the modern biotechnological tools and techniques, can be a suitable approach for successful remediation of contaminated water bodies. This review article focuses on the different biotechnological strategems like omics, proteomics, genomics, metabolomics and CRISPR in order to ameliorate the phytoremediation potential of the aquatic plants. The recent ground-breaking advancements to achieve desired genetic modification uses, CRISPR technology, to transfer a target set of genes to be assimilated into the plant genome of interest. Two variants of this technology, i.e. CRISPR-Cas9 as well as CRISPR-Cpf1 can be used for producing knock-outs, making gene substitutions, and targeting transcription and its regulation in the particular plant genome, to improve its phytoremediation efficiency.