Fungi As Bioremediators

Biological remediation methods have been successfully used to treat polluted soils. While bacteria have produced good results in bioremediation for quite some time now, the use of fungi to decontaminate soils has only recently been established. This volume of Soil Biology discusses the potentials of filamentous fungi in bioremediation. Fungi suitable for degradation, as well as genetically modified organisms, their biochemistry, enzymology, and practical applications are described. Chapters include topics such as pesticide removal, fungal wood decay processes, remediation of soils contaminated with heavy and radioactive metals, of paper and cardboard industrial wastes, and of petroleum pollutants.

An authoritative account of the application of fungi to the treatment of environmental pollution.

The first encyclopedic examination of the application of fungi in bioremediation, this book gives an overview of the science today and covers all aspects of this multidisciplinary field. It provides a solid foundation in the fundamentals and progresses to practical applications. It features step-by-step guidance for a myriad of effective techniques to identify, select, and apply fungi towards the remediation of contaminated sites.

This book highlights the role fungi play in bioremediation, as well as the mechanisms and enzymes involved in this process. It covers the application of bioremediation with fungi in polluted sites and gives a wide overview of the main applications of remediation, such as degradation of xenobiotics, gaseous pollutants, and metal reduction. The book explains the degradation of emergent pollutants and radioactive compounds by fungi, which is relevant to the current pollution problems that have been studied over the last few decades. The book also describes the most advanced techniques and tools that are currently used in this field of study.

Volume 3 covers recent research with expanded coverage on this important area of remediation. Mycoremediation is the form of bioremediation in which fungi-based technology is used to decontaminate the environment. Fungi are among the primary saprotrophic organisms in an ecosystem, as they are efficient in the decomposition of organic matter. Wood-decay fungi, especially white rot, secretes extracellular enzymes and acids that break down lignin and cellulose. Fungi have been proven to be a very cost-effective and environmentally-friendly way for helping to remove a wide array of toxins from damaged environments or wastewater. These toxins include heavy metals, persistent organic pollutants, textile dyes, leather tanning industry chemicals and wastewater, petroleum fuels, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon, pharmaceuticals and personal care products, pesticides and herbicides, in land, fresh water and marine environments. Bioremediation of toxic organics by fungi is the most sustainable and green route for cleanup of contaminated sites and we discuss the multiple modes employed by fungi for detoxification of different toxic and recalcitrant compounds including prominent fungal enzymes viz., catalases, general lipase, laccases, peroxidases and sometimes intracellular enzymes, especially the cyrochrome P450 monooxygeneses. Fungi play an important role in the biogeochemical cycling of manganese and other redox-active metals, which is related to their ability to survive radiation and other oxidative challenges. This book covers recent research with more detail on the various types of fungi and associated fungal processes used to clean up wastes and wastewaters in contaminated environments, and discusses their potential for environmental applications.

Bioremediation is the use of microorganisms' metabolism to degrade waste contaminants (sewage, domestic, and industrial effluents) into non-toxic or less toxic materials by natural biological processes. Remediation through fungi—or mycoremediation—has multifarious possibilities in applied remediation engineering and the future of environmental sustainability. Fungi have the biochemical and ecological capability to degrade environmental organic chemicals and to decrease the risk associated with metals, semi-metals, noble metals, and radionuclides, either by chemical modification or by manipulating chemical bioavailability. Additionally, the capability of these fungi to form extended mycelia networks, the low specificity of their catabolic enzymes, and their using pollutants as a growth substrate make these fungi well suited for bioremediation processes. Their mycelia exhibit the robustness of adapting to highly limiting environmental conditions often experienced in the presence of persistent pollutants, which makes them more useful compared to other microbes. However, despite dominating the living biomass in soil and being abundant in aquatic ecosystems, fungi have not been exploited for the bioremediation of such environments. This book covers the various types of fungi and associated fungal processes used to clean up waste and wastewaters in contaminated environments and discusses future potential applications.

This book was written by undergraduate students at The Ohio State University (OSU) who were enrolled in the class Introduction to Environmental Science. The chapters describe some of Earth's major environmental challenges and discuss ways that humans are using cutting-edge science and engineering to provide sustainable solutions to these problems. Topics are as diverse as the students, who represent virtually every department, school and college at OSU. The environmental issue that is described in each chapter is particularly important to the author, who hopes that their story will serve as inspiration to protect Earth for all life.

This book puts an updated account on functional aspects of multiphasic microbial interactions within and between plants and their ecosystem. Multipronged interaction in the soil microbial communities with the plants constitute a relay of mechanisms that make profound changes in plant and its micro-environment in the rhizopshere at physiological, biochemical and molecular levels. In agro-ecological perspectives, such interactions are known to recycle nutrients and regulate signalling molecules, phytohormones and other small molecules that help plant growth and development. Such aspects are described deeply in this book taking examples from various crop plants and microbial systems. Authors described the most advantageous prospects of plant-microbe interaction in terms of inoculation of beneficial microorganisms (microbial inoculants) with the plants in which microbes proliferate in the root rhizosphere system and benefit plants' with definite functions like fixation of nitrogen, solubilization and mobilization of P, K, Zn and production of phytohormones. The subject of this book and the content presented herein has great relevance to the agro-ecological sustainability of crop plants with the help of microbial interactions. The chapters presented focus on defining and assessing the impact of beneficial microbial interactions on different soils, crops and abiotic conditions. This volume entails about exploiting beneficial microbial interactions to help plants under abiotic conditions, microbe-mediated induced systemic tolerance, role of mycorrhizal interactions in improving plant tolerance against stresses, PGPR as nutrient mobilizers, phytostimulants, antagonists and biocontrol agents, plant interactions with Trichoderma and other bioagents for sustainable intensification in agriculture, cyanobacteria as PGPRs, plant microbiome for crop management and phytoremediation and rhizoremediation using microbial communities. The overall content entrust advanced knowledge and applicability of diversified biotechnological, techno-commercial and agro-ecological aspects of microbial interactions and inoculants as inputs, which upon inoculation with crop plants benefit them in multiple ways.