ABSTRACT
Recently, environmental pollution has become a significant problem, and the toxic contamination from hazardous waste products, chemicals, and heavy metals has had a significant impact on the natural world. These toxic pollutants enter the environment either by natural phenomena or because of widespread industrialization. These pollutants could accumulate and enter the food chain via agricultural soils, and therefore, are a major threat to food security and cause damage to animals and humans. Many contemporary methods, such as chemical, physical, and biological are used for the remediation of these pollutants; however, they are not adequate to mitigate the problems caused by pollution. Therefore, bioremediation based on microbial enzymes is a simple, quick, eco-friendly, and socially acceptable method that can be used to reclaim the contaminated environment. Previous studies found that these pollutants cannot be eliminated from the environment but can be effectively transformed into less toxic forms or neutralized to reduce their adverse effects on the environment. Recently, a variety of microbial enzymes have been identified that can degrade these recalcitrant pollutants. Their potential to degrade toxic pollutants provides advantages over other technologies in process control, reusability, and safety. Worldwide, several strategies have been applied for the recovery of contaminated sites using microbial communities. This chapter will discuss the toxic effects of several pollutants in the environment on humans, and the mechanisms used by different microbes for environmental remediation. In addition, it will emphasize the different enzymatic techniques and the challenges involved in degrading pollutants. Furthermore, it discussed the potential development of biological techniques that use microbes to clean the environment.
