Bioaugmentation: an approach to biological treatment of pollutants

Understanding Nanoscale Interactions between Minerals and Microbes: Opportunities for Green Remediation of Contaminated Sites

“…The dominant functional microorganisms and microbial pathways responsible for contaminant degradation and transformation vary significantly in different environments. , Yet a large number of mechanistic studies on microbe–mineral interactions heavily rely on pure culture experiments using model strains from the literature, which tend to fall short of environmental representativeness. , This appears to be a major hurdle for the successful deployment of bioaugmentation, as the microbial inoculum often cannot adapt to the environmental conditions of a target site, or tends to lose its potency in contaminant degradation due to the presence of alternative carbon and nutrient sources. , Identifying key microbial drivers and elucidating molecular-level mechanisms, however, are challenging, as environmental samples contain numerous types of coexisting microorganisms, and multiple microorganisms can be responsible for the degradation and transformation of a given contaminant. − Traditional techniques that are based on the isolation of individual strains from complex microbial habitats are too inefficient in linking the metabolic phenotypes and genotypes of microbes to microbial activities. − The lack of spatial and temporal resolutions hinders mechanistic understanding of the dynamics of microbial activities. One solution is to combine multiomics (e.g., metabolomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, epigenomics, and genomics) and bioinformatics for data collection, machine learning for data interpretation, and gene editing for mechanism confirmation (Figure ).…”

Degradation of PET Plastics by Wastewater Bacteria Engineered via Conjugation

“…This process, known as genetic bioaugmentation, can be achieved through in situ delivery of broad-host-range conjugative plasmids. This genetic bioaugmentation approach has not been used for environmental bioremediation of microplastics, but the technique has been investigated by introduction of catabolic genes into microbial communities for bioremediation of non-plastic-based pollutants in laboratory and pilot scale settings [30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37] .…”