Bioremediation: A Low-Cost and Clean-Green Technology for Environmental Management

As the industry advances and the world population increases, the planet has accumulated the waste generated by human activity. Many of them are nondegradable and others of slow degradation that favor their accumulation in nature without adequate treatment. Although oil spills are the most notorious episodes, there is a range of pollutants derived from all types of industry such as pesticides, refrigerants, solvents, detergents, heavy metals, and the already abundant plastics. Faced with this problem, the use of microorganisms is a valuable tool in the remediation of soils, taking advantage of its metabolic potential, adaptability insurmountable to different environments, and the symbiotic behavior that can establish with plants. Genetic engineering has also given way to the study of genetically modified microorganisms as bioremediation agents, which express specific genes in the presence of pollutants. The bacterial species mostly used in bioremediation are Acinetobacter sp., Burkholderia cepacia, Deinococcus radiodurans, Dehalococcoides ethenogenes, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Pseudomonas putida, and some fungi.