A comprehensive review on the potential of microbial enzymes in multipollutant bioremediation: Mechanisms, challenges, and future prospects

Abstract

Industrialization and other human activity represent significant environmental hazards. Toxic contaminants can harm a comprehensive platform of living organisms in their particular environments. Bioremediation is an effective remediation process in which harmful pollutants are eliminated from the environment using microorganisms or their enzymes. Microorganisms in the environment often create a variety of enzymes that can eliminate hazardous contaminants by using them as a substrate for development and growth. Through their catalytic reaction mechanism, microbial enzymes may degrade and eliminate harmful environmental pollutants and transform them into non-toxic forms. The principal types of microbial enzymes which can degrade most hazardous environmental contaminants include hydrolases, lipases, oxidoreductases, oxygenases, and laccases. Several immobilizations, genetic engineering strategies, and nanotechnology applications have been developed to improve enzyme performance and reduce pollution removal process costs. Until now, the practically applicable microbial enzymes from various microbial sources and their ability to degrade multipollutant effectively or transformation potential and mechanisms are unknown. Hence, more research and further studies are required. Additionally, there is a gap in the suitable approaches considering toxic multipollutants bioremediation using enzymatic applications. This review focused on the enzymatic elimination of harmful contaminants in the environment, such as dyes, polyaromatic hydrocarbons, plastics, heavy metals, and pesticides. Recent trends and future growth for effectively removing harmful contaminants by enzymatic degradation are also thoroughly discussed.

Keywords: Biodegradation; Genetic engineering; Mechanisms; Microbial enzymes; Multipollutant; Nanotechnology.