Abstract
The biodeterioration process involves every type of Cultural Heritage item, including monuments, stoneworks, frescoes, and easel paintings. The accurate study of the microbial and fungal communities dwelling on artworks, and involved in their deterioration, is essential for the adoption of optimal prevention and conservation strategies. Conventional restorative methods, that usually involve chemical and physical technologies, present some disadvantages, including short-term and unsatisfactory effects, potential damage to the treated works, human toxicity, and environmental hazards. Research in the field of restoration has paved the way for innovative biological approaches, or ‘biorestoration’, in which microorganisms are not only considered as an eventual danger for artworks, but rather as potential tools for restoration. The present review describes the main aspects of the biodeterioration process and highlights the most relevant biorestoration approaches: bioconsolidation, biocleaning, biological control, and new promising bio-decontaminating compounds.
Highlights
Biodeterioration represents a major and significant issue in Cultural Heritage conservation and restoration, which affects historic stonework, statues, monuments, and paintings
Bioremediation is centered on the use of bacteria with different enzymatic activities and includes the use of biocalcifying bacteria (BCB), sulfate-reducing bacteria (SRB), nitrate-reducing bacteria (NRB), and hydrolytic activity due to several enzymes, such as lipases, proteases, and carbohydrases
The crusts have a multicomponent composition, including sulfate deposits, nitrate salts, and other compounds such as carbonates, apatite, and proteins traces. These complex matrixes have been treated by combined bioremediation strategies: SRB-Carbogel application coupled with mechanical pre-intervention on crust [73] or chemical pretreatment with a nonionic detergent [74]; mixture of SRB (D. vulgaris ATCC 29579) and NRB (Pseudomonas pseudoalcaligenes KF707) in a multilayer biosystem [75]; SRB added with bacterial strains able to degrade different protein matrices [76]
Summary
Biodeterioration represents a major and significant issue in Cultural Heritage conservation and restoration, which affects historic stonework, statues, monuments, and paintings. Among the wide array of culturally relevant items, for example, easel and mural paintings represent composite materials, containing both organic and inorganic substrates that frequently promote the colonization of a wide range of microorganisms. Their growth and metabolic activities often cause a deterioration process of the artworks, including mechanical/physical damages or aesthetic deterioration [5]. Traditional employed techniques include optical microscopy (OM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) To overcome these problems, since the 2000s, the introduction of DNA-based methodologies, such as Real-Time PCR and genotyping identification (NGS, WGS), has been introduced in the study of microbial contaminating populations allowing the identification of most of the present microorganisms. The present mini-review aimed to summarize the main aspects of the biodeterioration/ biorestoration processes, with particular focus on studies of our work group and applications in Italy
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