Microbial Mitigation of Pharmaceutical Soil Toxicity

Dear Colleagues,

Pharmaceutical residues have become an increasingly significant class of environmental contaminants, posing measurable risks to soil health, terrestrial ecosystems, and food safety. As pharmaceuticals enter soils through wastewater irrigation, biosolids, animal manure, industrial discharge, and improper disposal, they can alter microbial communities, disrupt soil biochemical processes, and accumulate in plants. The urgent need for sustainable, biologically grounded remediation approaches has prompted rapid growth in research exploring the potential of microorganisms to mitigate pharmaceutical-induced soil toxicity.

This Special Issue of Toxics aims to provide an international platform for advancing our understanding of microbial mechanisms, interactions, and strategies that reduce the environmental impact of pharmaceuticals in soils. We welcome both fundamental and applied studies that contribute to the development of effective, eco-friendly, and scalable bioremediation solutions.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Microbial degradation pathways of pharmaceutical contaminants in soils;
• Interactions between pharmaceuticals and indigenous / engineered microbial communities;
• Microbial consortia, bioaugmentation, and biostimulation strategies;
• Antibiotic resistance dynamics in pharmaceutical-contaminated soils;
• Pharmaceutical effects on soil microbiome structure, function, and resilience;
• Rhizosphere-associated microbial processes mitigating pharmaceutical toxicity;
• Microbial contributions to phytoremediation efficiency;
• Omics-based approaches (metagenomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics) in studying microbial mitigation;
• Environmental fate, transport, and transformation products formed through microbial activity;
• Assessment of ecological risk reduction following microbial remediation interventions.

Dr. Mariusz Cycoń
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the Special Issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Toxics is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.