“…This process makes many metal minerals susceptible to leaching under acidic conditions, leading to heavy metal pollution (Hartley et al, 2020; Huang et al, 2019; Zhang et al, 2020). Numerous researchers have isolated acidic bacterial strains from sulphide minerals for the bioleaching of rare and precious heavy metals (Gan et al, 2019), and have conducted analyses to ascertain the primary pollution sources in certain sulphide minerals (Kang et al, 2020), including the bioleaching of elements like lead (Ram et al, 2021), zinc, chromium, cadmium, copper and arsenic (Çiçek et al, 2021). Additionally, the approach of microbial hydrometallurgy has been developed as an extension of this research (Adamou et al, 2019).…”