Role of Microbes in the Remediation of Pollutants in the Environment
A special issue of Microorganisms (ISSN 2076-2607). This special issue belongs to the section "Environmental Microbiology".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 June 2025 | Viewed by 11854
Special Issue Editors
Interests: environmental microbiology
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Multiple anthropogenic activities contribute to the contamination and degradation of ecosystems, threatening good environmental status and human health and calling for urgent, effective, and sustainable remediation solutions.
The chemical contamination of the ecosystems represents a major concern, leading to detrimental consequences at different levels of biological organization. However, the effects on the diversity and ecological function of microbial assemblages are still largely unknown, which limit our understanding of the impact of different types of contaminants on overall ecosystem functioning.
In addition, deepening our knowledge on the diversity and metabolic pathways of microbes inhabiting contaminated sites can unveil novel taxa (either as single strains or consortia) with biotechnological potential for the bioremediation of harmful pollutants. Indeed, bioremediation approaches based on the stimulation of useful autochthonous microbes (biostimulation) or the addition of useful microbes (bioaugmentation) are gaining increasing attention for their eco-compatibility and lower costs. For effective bioremediation, ideal microbes should be abundant and metabolically active in the natural system, resistant to mixed contaminations, easy to grow, and responsive to selective stimulation. However, frequent failures are observed due to unsuccessful increases in the abundance or activity of target microbes, or due to the low fitness of lab-grown microbes once released into the contaminated environment. It is thus important to improve our knowledge on the diversity and dynamics of natural microbial assemblages for optimizing bioremediation performance, especially in sites that show the co-presence of multiple contaminants.
This Special Issue calls for papers covering the following topics:
- Next-generation sequencing studies on the diversity and function of microbes (including bacteria, archaea, microbial eukaryotes, and their viruses) in contaminated sites;
- Studies on the potential of contaminants to act as drivers of microbial assemblage diversity and/or functioning in ecosystems and the possible use of microbes as pollution bioindicators/biosensors;
- Experimental studies on the effects of contamination on microbes and the use of microbes for the bioremediation of contaminated ecosystems;
- Microbial/microbiome engineering to boost the bioremediation of contaminated sites;
- Understanding the mechanisms of microbial-mediated bioremediation and synergic interactions between different microbes that can enhance bioremediation yields;
- Emerging pollutants and possible microbial-mediated bioremediation approaches for their removal/detoxification;
- Microbial products useful for the bioremediation of contaminated sites (biosurfactants, siderophores, enzymes, metallothioneins, phytochelatins, EPS, etc.);
- Studies covering other aspects related to this Special Issue, even if not included in the list above.
Dr. Lilan Zhang
Dr. Xiaowei Liu
Guest Editors
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Keywords
- bioremediation
- bacteria
- archaea
- fungi
- microalgae
- viruses
- petroleum hydrocarbons
- heavy metals
- emerging pollutants
- experimental biostimulation and bioaugmentation
- bioindicators and biosensors
- microbial and microbiome engineering
- biosurfactants
- hydrocarbon-degrading enzymes
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