ABSTRACT
Environmental pollution poses a serious risk to human health and the ecosystem as a whole. Water (surface water and groundwater) can be contaminated directly by pollutants or receive them from the soil through leaching. Human intervention in the environment without concern for sustainable development aggravates the problem as residues from industrial activities, the use of chemical agents in agricultural crops, dumps, mining among other activities that produce toxic waste, are relevant sources of pollutants, mainly pesticides and heavy metals. To deal with this problem and promote the remediation of contaminated waters, different methodologies can be applied. This chapter will focus on the use of recombinant DNA technology to genetically modify organisms to make them suitable to perform bioremediation of contaminated waters.
